​We didn't plan it this way, but Santa and the Development Elves have been very busy, and the December release is one of our most comprehensive releases of 2015. We have added some important new features - such as parimutuel betting, e-commerce options on open registration, USGA Section 17 hole handicapping analysis, and many enhancements in response to customer requests.
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Parimutuel Betting
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Many clubs provide parimutuel betting for member/guest, member/member and other major events. We have implemented a complete parimutuel betting system. This can be enabled from the first tab in the Event Profile; after being enabled, setup is quite straightforward:
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Note that there are two modes for calculating winnings for place and show. The "official" method is to return the amount bet to each winner, then allocate the remaining pool to the winners; but in speaking to customers, it seems that other software products simply divide the entire pool among the winners. Once setup, betting can be done by multiple betting stations - an advantage of cloud-based software:

The odds are calculated every few seconds and updated on all PCs taking bets. This is a great addition to any draw party or opening cocktail party. The tote board (winnings) can be calculated at the press of a button, and also displayed on the TV leaderboard:

The ability to display both the bets and the payouts on the TV Display will be available in our January release.
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​Enhancements to Open Registration Payments
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We have seen many clubs profitably use Golf Genius for outings by charging a premium for live scoring, TV leaderboards, the outing website, etc. Having guests register through our open registration system raises the professionalism of the event, and eliminates the hassle of getting a player spreadsheet late and in the wrong format :). We have added a comprehensive e-commerce payment module to handle the wide range of participation options offered. It is very easy to define many different offers, and to have registrants choose from among these:

When a guest clicks on new registration, he or she can choose the desired option and proceed to checkout via credit card (or you can allow guests to register without immediate payment):

Hole Handicapping Analysis
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Determination of hole handicaps (which hole is handicap hole 1, which is handicap hole 2, etc.) requires that scorecards be examined and is an arduous process, all defined in Section 17 of the USGA Handicap Manual. We can now save the golf professional an enormous amount of time by using the hole by hole scorecard data collected during the season. We allow you to aggregate tees for larger sample sizes, select gender and set the course handicap ranges for scratch golfers and bogey golfers. This is found in the Customer Center, under a new tab titled "Data Analysis".
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Here is an example from Colorado Golf Club:

A tee group can consist of one tee (USGA standard) or multiple tees. Set the tees to be included, the gender codes to be included in the data set, and the scratch and bogey golfer course handicap ranges. After creating the tee groups, click "Save and Download XLS" and we generate a spreadsheet with one tab for each tee group; we provide the summary results as well as the details of each scorecard. Based on the number of scorecards, this may take a couple of minutes, but it will save many, many hours of tabulating scorecards and creating your own spreadsheet. Below is a sample from our own "Genius Island".

The Summary section above is the key to the analysis. As per USGA Section 17 Comparison Method, the holes are handicapped based on the difference in average score between bogey and scratch golfers. You can see from the above that we handicap the F9 and B9 based on how the course is already setup. Have a look at your course data, and you may have some surprises.
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​ Scorecard Enhancements
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It seems that with every release, we provide more scorecard enhancements. While most customers prefer a scorecard in landscape format 2-up, we have seen requirements for different page sizes/orientations and different number of scorecards per page (e.g., A4 portrait 3-Up, or U.S. portrait 2-up). The page size/orientation and scorecards per page can now be set when creating a scorecard (including custom size):

We also added the option to print prior round scores on the scorecard, and these can also be cumulative scores. It is another option when formatting the header lines on the scorecard.
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​ Spreadsheet Composer
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The print composer has been a huge success for creating custom cart signs, bag labels, locker signs, drink vouchers, and all sorts of documents for players, pairs or foursomes. It was designed to do much of what MS Publisher does, but within Golf Genius. There are times when Publisher or some other page composition tool is best suited to the job, and for this we are now introducing a spreadsheet composer. Just like the Print Composer, we can cycle through every player, pair, team or foursome. We create either a spreadsheet row or column for each player, pair, team or foursome (sometimes by column is better for input to MS Publisher).
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This feature can be found in the Download/ Print Center. After selecting spreadsheet composer, the first page you will see this:

Click on "Select Fields" and you will see an entire set of buttons for all the fields you can add to the spreadsheet. If you include first or last name "initial and remainder", we will include two fields - the first initial and then the rest of the name ("Z" and "isman") so that you can format the first letter in larger type, different color, etc. The spreadsheet composer is a very powerful capability that will serve you well if you need to export data to MS Publisher or other programs for complex printed materials.
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​ Aggregating Points over Season
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Many customers have asked us to allow them to aggregate points over multiple events, as opposed to having all of these events in one "league". If you go to the customer center, data analysis tab, you will see a link for Season Points. When you click on that, we will first do an analysis over all leagues and events connecting the players together by GHIN number, other unique IDs or names (find all occurrences of Mike Zisman). Then we total up all the points for display:

As you can see at the top, you can also control which leagues and events are included. There will soon be a website widget to display this on the player websites.
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​ Cloning Leagues and Events
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'Tis the season to start planning next year's schedule of events, and this usually involves cloning most of this year's leagues and events. We have again provided more flexibility as to what gets cloned:

If the event being cloned has 5 rounds, for example, we will take you to the calendar and ask you to select the dates for the 5 rounds in the new event. If you choose to clone tournaments, we will also copy over all division, flight and team definitions. The idea here is to copy over as much as possible to make setting up new events as easy as possible.
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​ More Handicapping Options
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Last month, we introduced decimal handicaps, often used to minimize ties. Based on customer feedback, we added the option to round to the nearest half stroke or truncate to the nearest half stroke. After we compute a course handicap, we can round to nearest whole number (USGA method), round to nearest 1/2 stroke, truncate to nearest 1/2 stroke, or round to the nearest tenth stroke. We also added the option to use index as course handicap, which means the course handicap is in tenths. This is all found in "More Handicap Options" when creating or editing a tournament. The "More Handicap Options" now looks like this:

From the tooltip above, you can also see that you can now add an "H" in the index field, and we will use this value as course handicap. We have seen many situations in outings where the client has indexes for some players and "he's a 21 handicap" for other players. Now, enter "21H" in the index column, and we will use 21 as the CH.

Decimal Handicaps
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A number of customers run events where they use decimal handicaps to minimize ties. Instead of rounding a course handicap to an integer, it is rounded to one decimal place. We have added full support for decimal handicaps in this release, including proper display of decimal handicaps on scorecards and the leaderboard. The iPhone, Android and iPad apps will display decimal handicaps next week. When creating a tournament, this option is set under More Handicap Options:

If the tournament is scramble or alternate shot, where we first compute individual handicaps and then a team handicap, you have the option to use decimal handicaps at both levels of the calculation (player and team), or at just the team level (round individual handicaps to integer, but team handicap to tenths). Decimal handicaps can be specified for stroke play, match play, and skins. It is not applicable to formats like Stableford or Quota. We will shortly provide an additional option so that decimal handicaps can be rounded to 0 or .5, or truncated to 0 or .5.

​ Better Handicapping on 6/6/6 and new Support for 9/9 Formats
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We have expanded the handicap options when setting up a 6/6/6 or 3/3/3 tournament; you can now select the handicap method for each 6 hole or 3 hole tournament:

For each format, we provide all the handicap options that we do when playing this format over 18 holes.
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We have also added support for a 9/9 format - like alternate shot on the front nine and 2-person scramble on the back nine. We have always had the ability to create a front 9
alternate shot
tournament and back 9
scramble
tournament, for example. However, when doing that you could not create a single 18-hole scorecard properly dotted. With the 9/9 format selected from the Balls menu, you can now print a scorecard for the round and the card will be dotted properly. We calculate the 18 hole handicap for each format and then dot the F9 or B9 as appropriate. For example, assume a team's 18-hole alternate shot team HC is 9, and that alternate shot is being played on the front 9. This team will get one stroke on handicap holes 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9.
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Very importantly, you can link 6/6/6 or 9/9 tournaments to other tournaments. Desert Mountain, for example, has a tournament of almost 150 2-person teams over three courses, where the first round is 18 holes of better ball, followed by a second round of alternate shot on the front 9 and scramble on the back 9. Simply create two rounds with one tournament in each round (9/9 for second round), then create a linked tournament. This will appear as three tournaments on the leaderboard, as you would expect:

Defining Flights by Index Range
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We have added the ability to specify handicap index ranges when creating flights. As you enter a maximum index for a flight, we dynamically tell you how many golfers will be in the flight, so that you can fine tune the range. When creating flights, you now have these options:

If you specify a number of flights, a checkbox will appear for you to indicate if you wish to control the index ranges in each flight. If checked, you will be taken to a page like the one above. As you enter the maximum index for a flight and click Tab, Enter, or move the cursor to the next line, we immediately check and tell you how many golfers will be in the flight. Hence, you can easily change the index ranges to create flights of roughly the same size, if that is a goal.
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Note that you can flight by index, course handicap or prior results. Therefore, you can use a single or multi-round qualifier to flight a subsequent round.
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​ Enhancements to Tee Sheets
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You would think that a tee sheet is a tee sheet, but such is not the case :). We have added several options for printed tee sheets and for the tee sheet app on the player portal (which can also now be shown on the TV Display):

Scorecard Enhancements
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We're thrilled to see how many of you are using our scorecard composer to create very nice, multi-color multi-font scorecards. We've responded to a number of customer requests:

Enhancements for Leagues
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We have made a number of enhancements for league play. On Player League Standings in the portal app, we provide more options when selecting a division:

You can specify which columns to display, and you can exercise control over how we filter by division. These options are available for player league standings and customized player league standings. Additionally, we have added the ability to export the contents of these apps to a spreadsheet.
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We have also added an option on team league standings to filter by flight, and to display team members:

We have added the ability to specify different round prices based on a custom field or other variables. When you click on "Open Paid Registration" to set a per-golfer price for the round, there is now a "More Options" button, which allows price to be set by division, custom field, or even golfers from a prior round. We use our standard invoicing system to provide these options:

Cloning Leagues and Events
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Many clubs wish to set up next season's leagues and events during the off-season by cloning the leagues and events from this year. We now provide more fine-grained control over what gets copied over to a new league or event:

In our next release, we will provide the ability to copy over rounds and tournaments in those rounds (as well as multi-event tournaments).
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​ Other Features

We posted a new release this morning. This is a major release with many important features requested by customers, as well as a number of enhancements we felt would be useful. In every release we try to balance new features with usability, ease of use, and improved efficiency enhancements.
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​ Scorecards - the Final Mile
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Over the past year, we have made numerous enhancements to scorecard formatting. Today, we release more enhancements and a new design of the user interface:

We have organized the tools under several tabs, but most importantly added the ability to control font, size, color, etc. for each line of the scorecard. Here is a sample of a scorecard that takes advantage of this new feature:

New Tournament Option
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As the request of the Southern California Golf Association, we have added a really cool format useful for Inter-Club type events. You have probably played 9's as a game when you have a threesome - 9 points are awarded on each hole; 5/3/1 if there are no ties; 3/3/3 if all ties, etc. This has been expanded to award 9 points for a threesome, 16 points if there is a foursome, and 25 points if there is a fivesome. It is meant to be played by teams, where there is one player from each team in each foursome. Points in each hole roll up to the team totals, as we normally do, and at the end teams are awarded points with the same 9/16/25 rules. if you have defined teams, this option appears under Balls in tournament creation:

Portals (Event Website) Made Fully Responsive
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The player portals and all apps in the portals are now fully responsive and will display properly on all device types such as tablets and phones. We've also updated the UI a bit:

Here is an example of "responsive design". Displayed below is how the leaderboard displays on a normal full-width device and on a phone. Note how the names wrap nicely on the phone display. Modern day technology at work :)

We have made one other important change to portal setup, as requested by the Colorado Golf Club and several other customers. During the off-season, many customers want to set up all of their events for the next season. You can now create sections like Results, but hide the section until the event takes place and there are results to display. Create the initial portal with the results section, but edit the section and click to hide. It will not appear on the portal. When the event has first results, simply edit the section and un-click hide. To us, this is an example to streamline operations in the golf shop.
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​ New Tee Sheet in Portal
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We completely redesigned the tee sheet app for the portal. Previously, the portal simply displayed the printed tee sheet, with all of the pagination, headers, etc. Now, the tee sheet app for the portal is completely different from the printed version; plus, we added an individual view:

Players are listed in alpha order, and for each player, we show the other players in the foursome. "By Tee Times" displays a normal portrait view of the tee sheet. The new tee sheet is searchable and printable. You can also create the tee sheet for just one course and do this multiple times, so that you have a link on the portal to separate tee sheets by course.
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On a related note, we made an improvement to combined tee sheet/alpha lists for events on multiple courses, as requested by Desert Mountain. We now print a separate tee sheet and alpha sheet for each course, and then a combined alpha sheet for the entire field. The by-course alpha list is useful for golfers, and the combined sheet is useful for staff.
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​ Improvements to Create Pairings
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We've made two important improvements to creating pairings. The first issue deals with one day member guest events. For multi-day member guests created with our round robin scheduler, we are very careful to place the member, then the guest, in the pairings. We recently ran into an issue at Applebrook Golf Club with a one day member guest. When creating pairings by team, the players were not in member/guest order. That's because we normally place the players as low HC first, then higher HC of each team. This makes a lot of sense for match play, but not for this sort of member/guest. We have added an option when creating pairings by team so that you can make your intent clear:

Secondly, we have made a time-saving improvement when creating pairings by flight, as requested by Desert Mountain. We've had great feedback on our recently added ability to set course/tee/ tee time for each flight when building a round robin schedule. We have added the same capability when creating pairings by flight:

When you select the option to create pairings by flight, we now provide a button to set course and tee. When you click on that, we walk you through setting course/tee/tee time for each flight, just as we do with round robins.
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We've also added one other enhancement in this area worth noting. If you create pairings from a previous round and select "keep exact foursomes", we will copy over the course and tee information.
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​ Improvements to Managing Divisions, Flights and Team
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We see many cases where someone creates a division in a round, and then realizes that this newly created division should be an all-season division so that it can be used in other rounds. We've added a feature to convert a round-level division to an all-season division:

We've also added the ability create divisions from a custom field. This is a feature that we have had with flights and teams for some time, and have now expanded to include divisions.
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We've also become more intelligent about auto-updating team names when you change the content of a team or even when you drag players around to re-order a team. If you re-order the team and the team name was not set to alpha order, we will automatically change the team name so that it reflects the order of players within the team.
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​ We Sweat the Small Stuff

We posted a new release this morning. This is a major release with many important features requested by customers; you should review it carefully for much of this applies to all of our customers. As I stated in our July release letter, our commitment to you of "less work for golf professionals and league managers, more fun for golfers and more revenue for facilities" guides our development efforts as we strive to "hit on all cylinders".
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But first I want to congratulate Brian Gaffney for his incredible performance at the PGA Championship this past weekend. Brian was one of the top 20 finishers in the PGA National Championship, which won him a place at the PGA Championship. He then made the cut, and won the club professional competition. Wow. Brian is the head golf professional at Quaker Ridge Golf Club and a valued customer of ours.

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​ Further Enhancements to Round Robin Invitationals - Auto-Fill Flights
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Creating a RR schedule for five 9-hole matches with flights of 6 teams is pretty straightforward. Doing it over and over again as guests change and indexes get updated - affecting flight composition and position within flight - can be a real pain. We've added features over the past year to make this easier, and we include in this release what we think is the final step. We've also seen cases where clubs want to flight by % of HC, and not by index, and that is also dealt with here.
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We have added flight auto-fill. When you select this option for creating flights, you are presented with the following:
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If the teams (or players when flighting players) do not fit evenly into flights (e.g, 8 flights, 6 teams per flight, but only 43 teams), we provide the option to control how many teams are in each flight. If you choose to flight by CH, you then see:

We look at the player roster "tee" field (probably supplied on the uploaded spreadsheet) and let you associate a tee with each tee value, plus specify a % HC. We then calculate combined team HCs, and flight the teams. Since we also preserve the course and tee settings (all flights on white, but last flight on yellow), it is now very, very easy to change player data and regenerate the RR schedule. After you've done it once and set up the course/tee data (which we also make very easy), just update the player roster, reflight with auto-fill, and generate a new RR schedule - all in about 2 minutes. Then reprint score cards, etc., as necessary.
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The auto-fill feature for flights is not restricted to RR events, but is part of the flow of creating flights, either for players or teams.
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​ Advanced Handicapping
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We have added numerous handicapping options, all based on customer feedback. There is now a "More Handicap Options" button on create/edit tournament. Clicking brings up the following:

We offer maximum index and handicap for whatever values are in the gender fields in the player roster. As you can see, for team based events, we provide options when the difference in player handicaps is greater than X and when the combined team handicap is greater than Y. Note that these limits are applied in the order above: reduce index if necessary, calculate player CH and reduce to maximum if necessary, reduce player CHs further if necessary, then reduce again if the resulting team CH is greater than Y.
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​ More Options for Customizing Scorecards
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We have added the ability to have up to four logos/images on a scorecard - watermark left and right as well as logos on bottom of cards, left and right (these are available on 4 players per card, as well as 2 players and one player per card). We have also added an optional pace of play line. On course details, you can now store playing time per hole. We then apply that to the pace of play line, and this line can be placed anywhere on the card, just like scoring lines. Plus, we have added the ability to generate a scorecard per team. The common use is a member with three guests, and the member is on a team with each of the three guests. You can now create three scorecards for the three teams. Below is an example of a scorecard with three logos and a pace of play line:

More Feedback When Entering Scores
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We have made two enhancements in this area. First, on our mobile apps, we now optionally show "dots" for each player on each hole. It is possible that an event might have multiple tournaments such that a player could have a different handicap in different tournaments (all golfers division, men's division, ladies division). When you turn on mobile scoring, we ask which tournament to use for purpose of dotting the players on the mobile app. The Android app will be updated this week, and the iPhone and iPad app updates will be available next week. We have also made some usability enhancements to the mobile apps.
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Based on customer feedback, we now provide immediate feedback of net score or Stableford points on the Enter Scores page. Choose a tournament, and we automatically show either a player's net score based on HC for that tournament or Stableford points (net or gross, as appropriate). Below is an example of a partially entered card:

​ Tournament Enhancements

Other Usability Enhancements

This release has many new features, almost all of which have been requested by customers, which include private clubs, public facilities, resorts, professional and amateur associations, and individuals managing leagues and golf trips. Our commitment to you of "less work for golf professionals and league managers, more fun for golfers and more revenue for facilities" guides our development efforts as we strive to "hit on all cylinders".
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​ Enhancements to Round Robin Events and other Team-Based Events
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Organizing a member guest or member member tournament is an exacting process, and one where there are lots of last minute changes as rosters change, handicaps get updated, etc. We attend many of these events to observe first-hand where we can make changes to be more efficient. Here are a few things we have done in this release:
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Creating the Round Robin Schedule
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In many member/guest tournaments, the format at five 9-hole matches, with some flights on the F9 and some on the B9 in each round. Sometimes the tee depends on flight or individual. We've seen for some time that (1) there is often a need to re-flight and recreate the RR schedule several times, and (2) the most tedious part of creating the RR schedule is setting course and tee for each round. We make it pretty easy to see the course/tee info (by course/tee, we mean course, tee, tee time, shotgun hole, etc.), but now we have made another important improvement: We retain the course/tee info so that when you recreate the RR schedule, you do not need to go through the process of setting course and tee info. This makes it very easy and quick to reflight and recreate the RR schedule. If you are recreating a RR schedule, we ask you if you want to retain the course/tee/tee info or respecify it.
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New Reports/ Spreadsheets
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Also, we have noticed that in most cases, teams are flighted based on combined team handicap index, but that there are cases where different criteria are used - such as 90% of combined team course handicap (CH). For the vast majority of teams, these two methods lead to the same result, but there can be a few differences. To make it as easy as possible for these sorts of cases, we have added a spreadsheet option from the download print center to "Export Teams Handicap Analysis to Excel". This spreadsheet will have one tab for each tournament in the selected round. There is one row per foursome. For each player, we have columns for player name, index, CH at 100%, CH at % allocation set in the tournament (e.g., 90%). Then for each team, we also have columns for difference in CH and combined playing CH. Sort on combined playing CH and you have a guide to flighting by 90% of combined CH, for example.
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Between the prior release and this release, we have added three important spreadsheets/ reports that are useful for member/guest and member/member events:
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Better Handling of Team Names
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In most cases, you choose to automatically create team names based on the names of the players in the team. We now "remember this" and automatically change the team name if the team composition changes (John has a new guest) or you change the handle of a player. It's little things like that that we have observed where we can save time for our customers (e.g., instead of playing in the member/guest at my home club, I assisted the pro staff in running two different member/guests in the same weekend -- I have developed a deep appreciation of what goes on in the "back room" to make these events seem "flawless").
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​ More Tournament Options
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As with every release, we enhance tournament setup options, based on customer requests:

Scorecards
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We continue to add more options for printing scorecards, and to make best use of the space as possible:

Score Entry
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Customers have expressed a need for more data to be available when entering scores on the score entry page. We have lots of ideas about how to provide feedback about tournament results when entering scores. As a first step, you can specify a tournament on the score entry page, and we will show each player's CH and show handicap dots in each hole. This makes it easier to reconcile the score totals to what was written on the scorecard.
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​ Scoring in Club Car Golf Carts with GPSI Displays
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We have partnered with Club Car and GPSI for some time to provide score entry and leaderboard display in the carts, and this has proven to be really popular. We have made enhancements to allow the golf shop to "take over" and change scores after a cart is off the course, and there are mistakes in the scores entered on the cart. Carts can now be de-linked from GPSI, or a cart by cart basis, so that scores can be corrected.
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​ Integrations
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Part of "more fun" is making it easier for members to access results and league/event websites from the member website. Single Sign On (SSO) means that when a member accesses a GG website from the member website, the identity of the member is "passed along" to us so that we know which player is viewing the website. We now provide SSO for ClubEssential, Jonas, MembersFirst and North Star. We also now support roster synchronization for ClubEssential and MembersFirst. In these cases, we will automatically, on a nightly basis, update the GG master roster based on changes to the member roster, as maintained by CE or MembersFirst. This is a great time-saver. If you use one of these partners for your member website, please call to talk with us about how these integrations can help. Bear in mind that SSO is not necessary for integration, but helpful. Simply having links in your member website to GG directories and websites makes it really easy for your members to navigate to GG websites/portals.
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​ Open Registration

Tee Sheet Settings in Edit Pairings
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We now allow direct control of tee times on a line-by-line basis just as we do with shotgun holes. This provides more "fine grained control" of the tee sheet:

Click on Set Tee Time of Set Shotgun and you can set individual foursome details as well as set details for a range of foursomes, as we have always done.

Bracket Tournaments
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We have completely rewritten our bracket tournament support based on customer usage patterns over the past year. To set the terminology straight, a bracket tournament (or knock-out as it is called offshore) has one winner. The bracket may have multiple "regions" for purposes of display, but there is ultimately one winner. With our new bracket support, you can:

​Gross/Net One Prize Tournaments

​Extensions to Open Registration

Cart Assignment on iPad App
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​Numerous Other Enhancements

Spring has sprung. We had over 150 tournaments completed Saturday and Sunday, many with live scoring and some with traditional end-of-round scoring. Plus, I sunk a 70 feet putt on # 18 at Merion in full view of the lunch crowd on the porch - so it was a good weekend. Many of the tournaments are interesting, and there were some really beautiful event portals created - with some great photography. My favorite for the weekend was a couples two-day member/guest. First 9 holes was better ball of couple 1 + better ball of couple 2; second nine was better ball of men + better ball of women; third nine was better ball of husband 1 and spouse 2 + better ball of husband 2 and spouse 1; last nine was best 2 balls of foursome. Each person was partnered with every other person in the foursome for 9 holes. Plus, photography taken during the event was on the TV leaderboard, and available to members and guests via the event website. It is gratifying to see creative PGA professionals push our product in these sorts of tournaments and really improve the member experience. Setup was simple - a linked tournament over both days, and the advanced ball option to check off how to score each nine holes.
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April's release has a number of very important features.
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​ Support for 5somes and 6somes
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We have added support for 5somes and 6somes on the tee sheet, in creating pairings, in all printed materials, in tournament setup and in scoring. What remains to be done is support for 5somes and 6somes in our phone apps for scoring. This last piece of work will be completed in the next month. For this reason, we are not generally releasing this feature; if you have a need and do not plan to use live scoring, please contact Support and we will enable this feature for you.
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We find 5somes in Pro-Am's and celebrity events. The trick here is to support the kinds of tournament formats that are fun for Pro-Am's, for example. How about pro at gross + best 2 net of the amateurs? Just check the boxes in advanced balls (below with the pro in position 5 on the tee sheet):

This advanced balls option is how the couples member/guest was created.
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​ Tournament Options
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We continue to respond to requests for more tournament options. We have added two important capabilities to live scoring. First, for stableford tournaments, we have add +/- par for ranking in live scoring. If you have 26 stableford points after 15 holes and I have 23 points after just 13 holes, I should be ranked higher than you, and that is now the case. Secondly, we have added the ability to ignore scores after a set number of holes until you click "complete". This would typically be set for 14 holes, so competitors will not see how your last 4 holes are scored. Heightens the excitement, for sure.
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​ Integration with other Systems
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We continue to work with our partners to better integrate with your member website, your handicapping service and your event registration systems. We have excellent partnerships with Club Essential, ForeTees, Jonas, MembersFirst, GHIN and Golf Net. Recently, we announced roster synchronization with MembersFirst, and today we are announcing Single Sign On (SSO) support with Club Essential. This means that members can sign into a CE member website and click links to access our directories (e.g., men's events, ladies events, etc.) and from these directories access event and league portals fully identified to us. We also provide CE calendar level integration, so that members can transition from an event flyer on the CE calendar to the corresponding Golf Genius portal. If your member website is provided by Club Essential, please contact us if SSO is appealing. We will implement SSO with other partners in the coming months.
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​ Open Registration and Payments
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We have made significant enhancements to our Open Registration capability and expanded our payment processing to include Open Registration. Leagues can now have members register and pay the registration fee. Funds flow directly from our payment processor to the league manager's bank account (just like Paypal, but we use Stripe). This capability can also be used by private clubs for outings - no more spreadsheets arriving at the last minute from an outing client in an unsuitable format. Plus, outing clients can have registrants pay online and collect funds almost immediately. Lastly, for private clubs and public courses that do not have an event registration system (and there are many of these), we now provide a high function event registration capability that allows for controls like "two members and two guests or one member and three guests" or "one member plus one guest or three guests, but not two guests":
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You can specify additional data to be collected (e.g., shirt size) for members and for guests. We now also send an email to all registered members when a registration is made or edited. We have made several other improvements based on feedback from early use customers.
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As stated above, we have added payment processing to Open Registration. When you enable open registration from the league or event profile and then create the registration form, you can specify optional or mandatory payment required. At the moment, we support price per golfer and price per group (e.g., $100 per golfer, $350 for a foursome). We will be adding more general payment options in the near future to better support charity outings.
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​ Improved Support for Team Lists
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We now have the capability to copy team lists from one division to another, which saves a lot of time. A common requirement is this: you have an all golfers division with 2-person teams - teams of men and teams of women. You then create a men's division and a women's division. Previously, you would need to recreate the team lists in each division. Now, when you create team lists, you can simply copy a team list from the all golfers division. We can pull in just those teams where there are golfers in the new division, or populate the new division with the members of the selected team list. Create a women's division, don't bother to populate it, copy in the women's team list, and check the box to copy golfers over as necessary.
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​ Registering Golfers with Golf Genius
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We have tried to limit the need to register golfers in the Golf Genius system - to have every user select a password to authenticate himself or herself to us - people do not need more passwords. If you use SSO, then we pick up the player's identity from your member website. If a player navigates to our portal just using the GGID for the event (think of this as an event or league password), then we acknowledge that the player is authenticated at the league or event level (we have done this for a long time). Now, if we need to know who you are and we do not know who you are, we ask you. To do this, we must have a master roster, and most of our private club and public course customers have created a master roster. When do we want to know who you are: (1) when you are registering for a league or event via Open Registration, or (2) you are registering to play in a league round on the league portal, or (3) you want to upload photos, or (4) you want to add to the message board. In the first two cases (registration) we offer a drop down list of all players in the master roster, and the player selects his or her name. You can require a password/validation field such as member number if you choose to do so. For photo upload and message board, we simply ask the user to enter his/her name or initials (master roster not required).
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If managers are not using SSO and are not satisfied with the level of security described above, registering players on Golf Genius with passwords is still available and easy to use.
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​ Organizing Tool for List of Leagues and Events
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Many clubs already have 40 or 50 leagues, events and outings created for 2015. The list of leagues and events was getting cumbersome at that size, so we have added a nice organizing tool. You can now create categories and easily move line items between categories by drag and drop or by selecting a category in the action list on the right:
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Categories might be outings, leagues, and events; or May, June July; or John, Dick, Mary. If any leagues/events in the category have open registration, we show a column indicating in registration is open or closed.
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​ GGID for Directories
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Directories (men's events, ladies events) now have GGIDs. A directory GGID entered by a member when signing in to Golf Genius will take the member to the directory, with Select buttons for leagues and events in the directory. This is also available on Android phones and will be available on iPhones in a few days .
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​ Other New Features

​Spring is coming; it's been a tough winter here in the Northeast. I just returned from the Club Managers Association (CMAA) meeting in San Antonio, where we won the Product of the Year award from Boardroom magazine. We were surprised and honored. Now back to the grindstone - we posted a new release this morning, our second of 2015. Here are the high points.
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​ More Tournament Support
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There are five types of tournaments that take place over multiple rounds:
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- Round robin invitationals (usually member/guest);
- multi-round single format tournaments such as a 54 hole low net championship;
- multi-round multi-format, such as one round better ball, one round alternate shot, one round both balls;
- Ryder Cups; and
- Bracket tournaments, including all-season tournaments.
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We are constantly working to expand the options and at the same time reduce the amount of work required to set these up. We made a number of improvements to invitational type tournaments in this release. Prior to this release, setting course, tee and shotgun information for each round was tedious. We have dramatically improved this by allowing you to effectively tell us, “here is how the flights should be placed (course, front, back, hole) in round 1, and please repeat that for rounds 3 and 5. You’ll probably want to edit the starting holes on rounds 3 and 5 so that the same team is not starting on hole 1, but we’ve made that really easy. We think you can now go from spreadsheet to RR tee sheet for 144 players in less than 15 minutes. We’ve also made it easier to create teams and flights, eliminating a lot of clicks, and we’ve added some options for naming teams.
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Brackets were very popular last year. Customers like the “on demand” bracket diagrams that we generate and the ease of posting match results. I’m pleased to report that we now support 2-person team brackets. We learned that many clubs have both individual brackets and team season brackets. We have also added the ability to seed the first by index (or team total index in the case of teams). Below is an example of the bracket diagrams we generate. These can be done every time a score is submitted, or on a regular schedule.

​ Printed Materials
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We’ve made some very major improvements in customizable printed materials. You can now specify a color for tees in course definition and then check a box in the scorecard composer to color the tees. Plus, watermarked logos can now resized, repositioned, and made more or less transparent. For 2-player scorecards, you can now instruct us to add names and dots to the marker notes. There are other enhancements you’ll see when you use this feature. Here is a scorecard that we think looks very professional:

Scoreboards now have many more options. In addition to scoreboards for multi-round tournaments, you can now generate a scoreboard for any tournament. You can control the number of score boxes, the labels on these boxes, and the color of each of the elements on the scoreboards. You can also instruct us to leave space for a team photo. The controls for scoreboards look like this, and are accessed from the download/print center:

You can also generate a spreadsheet of scoreboard data to merge into Excel templates or Publisher documents.
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​ Event / League websites
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I’ve been informed by my team that no one knows what a “portal” is and that we should refer to these portals as websites. So be it. We’ve seen league managers and event planners do some amazing things with our websites, so we have made some improvements to enhance web pages. First, we added options to our text editor- more fonts, and very importantly, line spacing. We also eliminated the length restriction on collage pages. Drag the bottom right corner down and the page gets longer. Plus, we moved the controls up so that collage pages are as wide as all other pages. Plus,plus — there is now a button to add an image directly from your desktop.
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​ Improvements to phone apps
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The iPhone app has been updated and the Android phone app brought to the same level as the iPhone app. If we did our job well, you won’t notice most of the improvements - it will just work better. We did add “forgot your password”, which we know was a source of frustration.
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​ Register for a specific tee time
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In some leagues, there is a desire to register for a specific tee time, as opposed to simply registering to play in the round. We built an “open tee time” registration system to assist the PGA of America with players registering for practice rounds for the 2015 PGA Professional National Championship being held at Philadelphia Cricket Club in June. That work has been rolled into our standard product that all of you use, and it can be used for some or all rounds in a league or event. This is fired up for a round by going to the round profile on the Round menu and checking open tee times under the "scheduling Settings" tab. From there, you set the tee time range. Then add the "Open Tee Times" app to your league website. When rounds are open for registration, league members can visit the league website, access the open tee times app, view the tee sheet and see who is already registered, and then select a tee time. This will be very attractive to leagues that want to allow players to select tee time directly. Below is a screenshot of a league with two rounds open for registration, and what happens when a user clicks on one of the rounds:
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​ Open Registration
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Open registration has proven to be very popular for outings at clubs and public courses, and for individuals organizing golf events. With open registration, a customer creates a registration form indicating how many members can be registered and how many guests can be registered. This can be used for league or tour registration, by clubs for outing events where the client wishes to allow self- registration and for clubs that do not have tee time systems. We have made a number of improvements in this release. Note the difference between registering to become a member of a league with open registration, and then registered to play in a specific round of the league, possibly with open tee times.
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​ Edit Pairings
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You will notice a new look at the edit pairings page:

We no longer show total foursome index, as it was rarely of use. This effort is the beginning of a process to support fivesomes and sixsomes, important for tournaments such as pro-ams. We will support tournaments such as "pro's gross plus 2 best net of others".
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​ Integration with Club Website Providers
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We have efforts under way to integrate better with website suppliers such as MembersFirst, Club Essential, Jonas and Foretees. We have excellent relationships with these suppliers, as well as with Foretees for event registration. In this release, we provide automatic daily synchronization between the MembersFirst roster and our master roster. We are working on "Single Sign On" with all of these suppliers and will be announcing this capability soon.
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​ Locale
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While most of our customers are in the U.S., we have always had a good presence in Canada. In fact, Golf Genius is used in over 40 countries, but the product is only supported in English. We have recently started actively marketing in the United Kingdom, and so we have added a "locale" to a customer account record. We can then tailor our printed materials to the country. Today, scorecards printed in the UK do not show a slope, use the term "SSS" instead of rating, and use the term "stroke index" instead of handicap hole. This also allows our payment system to deal in pounds sterling, Canadian dollars, etc. Our payment processing is used by many leagues and tours and we made a number of improvements to that feature in this release.
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We posted a new release this morning which you will experience when you sign in. We have added a number of new features, some of which are very important. All of these features will be demonstrated at the PGA Merchandise Show; if you'll be there, please visit us in Booth #2309.
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​ Printed Materials
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We heard clearly from our customers that in addition to all of our live scoring capabilities, you need the wide range of printed materials you use today. We have implemented this in three steps. First, we released a scorecard composer so that you can create scorecards exactly the way that you want them. This is now widely used by customers. Next we released scoreboards for multi-round tournaments, where we again provide a great deal of flexibility. We will also provide all of the needed data in a spreadsheet for those of you who use MS Publisher to create large scoreboards. Today we are releasing our "Print Composer (PC)". Think of it as MS Publisher like capabilities but integrated right in to Golf Genius. For simple things like bag labels, welcome packet labels, locker cards for guests, customized cart sign and simple scoreboards, PC is the tool for you. For more complex printing, we provide the spreadsheets for you to integrate with Excel or Publisher.
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PC works on a model of forms and reports. A form, like "Avery 5160", indicates the size of the paper, the margins, and the number of rows and columns of the "report area". Avery 5160 labels are 10 rows and 3 columns, for example. We provide a library of forms and you can add other forms. We or you can then define reports, which is what is to appear on each label, for example. Just like Publisher, we use "placeholders" like %name% or %hole%. We use our collage editor, with which most of you are familiar. We can process players (bag labels), pairs (cart signs) or foursomes (scoreboards).
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You access all of this from the "Print Composer" link in the Download/Print Center. When you click on Print Composer, you will see this page:
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You can see forms and reports we have already created for you (Author is GGS) and forms and reports created by the event manager or customer manager. You will probably tailor your own version of bag labels, locker cards, etc. once and be done with it. When you click to edit a report or add a new one, you will see:
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Tell us what form to use, and if this is per player, per pair or per foursome. Next is our standard collage editor, with the label shown to scale:
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Add Photo to drag in a logo, then Add Text to tell us what you want on the label:
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Click on any of the buttons on bottom and we insert the placeholder, like hole number. You control font, size, color, etc. Save and print:

Because this report was set up to use the Avery 5160 label, it will print properly on real 5160 labels. What about locker cards, where you just need to print cards for guest? You can specify a filter before you print:
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You can filter on one or more fields. As you can imagine, we get requests all the time to make small changes in printed materials. We'd rather give you the tools to do what you want, when you want. People using our product are very adept at Excel, Publisher and would "rather do it themselves". If you like our bag labels, use them. If not, click edit and roll your own.
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​ Branding and Messaging on Mobile Apps
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Most of you use our free mobile apps for the iPhone, Android, Windows phone and iPad to enter scores and view the live leaderboard. We have added the ability for you to add you own logo, color and banners. We have also provided the ability for you to insert message or sponsor content between holes. This is all accessed from a new Apps tab on the manager site:
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We have moved access to the portal to this page, to keep all apps related items on one page. Again, you use our collage editor to create banners and inter-hole pages. Here is a sample for an outing where mobile pages can be sold as part of sponsorship:
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Messages can be placed after specific holes, or after a number of holes played in a shotgun (e.g., after a group has played 17 holes, show a message about cocktails after golf. Click Design New Page or edit an existing page:
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You can use our tools, or have someone create the content in Photoshop and simply pull in as a photo. Here is what all of this looks like on phone:

For those of you running leagues or tours, here is a great way to tailor the app with your branding. For those of you at clubs running outings, this can be a source of revenue for your outing clients.
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Tournament Formats: 6/6/6 and 3/3/3
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We have added these formats, giving you the flexibility to choose which formats are played first, second and last. If the competition is pair vs. field or pair vs. flight, then under balls you will see options for 6/6/6 and 3/3/3:
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And More.....
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We are always working to improve usability. We have made numerous improvements, and here are a few highlights:
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