Advanced Team Scheduler - 7.5

• Useful for people who organize team sporting or game events. It can organize an unlimited number of teams for an unlimited number of games. Simply fill in the requested information into the wizard like interface, and Advanced Team Scheduler automates the season, tournament, league, match, round-robin schedules. A great first step and time saving tool for anyone who does alot of match scheduling. Advanced Team Scheduler can schedule games with any user specified combination of dates and times, regular or irregular. The scheduler gives you complete control over all aspects of the schedule, and creates solutions effortlessly and elegantly in accordance with the user data entered. It is highly customizable with repeated use can be molded to automatically accomplish users' unique scheduling needs.

Scheduling Algorithms and supported schedule types

• Intelligent scheduling time generation algorithm to produce schedules with a more efficient and compressed chronological ordering.
• Intelligent handling of team or location specific constraints: The average number of team games per weeks are automatically evaluated, and the generated constraints are conformed to this average each schedule week so to provide an even smoothing of team and location distibutions throughout the season.
• Uses a constraint logic programming algorithm (modified canonical pattern) by mathematician Dominic de Werra as a schedule basis, prior to any hard constraint adjustments.
• Support for single or multiple round robin schedules, custom, single or double elimination tournaments.
• Schedules can vary wildly over dates, i.e. games can take place on a Monday and Tuesday of the first week, Wednesday, Thursday of the second week and Friday and Saturday on the third week and can be accomplished without too much data entry
• Support for groupings of multiple schedules in order to track conflicts and manage inter-divisional play.
• Inter-divisional auto conflict resolution: Users may have conflicts 'automatically resolved' across all divisions/groupings within a project upon schedule creation.
• Officiating crew conflict resolution can be local to a schedule or global to a schedule grouping.

Schedule evaluations

• Detailed interactive reports for every schedule that can respond to changes made by users directly in the schedule tables. Reports include, schedule quality ratio score, number of games per team, number of home and away games, home and away patterns for each team, a confrontation chart depicting the number of games each team plays against it's rivals, and the home and away pattern for those rivalries.
• Team Games Per Week Chart: Evaluation report dipicting the bounding dates and number of games that each team plays for each week plotted within a schedule. Interim weeks that do not have scheduled games are omitted.
• Games that could not be scheduled due to impossible constraint combinations are detailed in the generated schedule report, and reflected in the overall schedule report quality ratio.
• Generate schedule standings and output the results to an HTML file. Support for user defined tie resolution strategies.
• Master Schedule Views which allows filtered viewing of games for user defined game objects, including Teams, Locations, and Officials with data sorted in the appropriate chronological ordering

Publishing formats

• Includes schedule data output to a .ics file suitable for integration (importing) into a variety of calendar publishing programs. Those programs would include Microsoft Outlook XP (can be exported as a csv file and publish on the web for the general public at Yahoo Calendar), Mac OS X iCal, Mozilla Calendar (Window, Linux), (for web publication and subscription on .Mac or any WEBDAV enabled server..i.e. http://icalx.com), and Ximan Evolution on Linux. This data can also be simply uploaded to a remote directory using the ATS FTP utility allowing users to directly subscribe to your calendar within viewing programs like iCal and Mozilla or have them redirected and viewed on a number of PHP Calendar rendering sites like http://iCalShare.com for public preview as well as synched with mobil device calendars.
• Export to HTML including schedule, team, location, and team player roster specific data to be viewed in a web browser of choice (i.e. Netscape, Internet Explorer, Mozilla, etc.)
• Team, location, official, and player data can be exported to XML file format making it possible to incorporate those objects into any copy of ATS regardless of OS platform or ATS version. A practical way to submit team rosters electronically to league organizers.
• Team roster game line up forms may be exported as HTML or CSV files for hard copy presentatations to Officials and opponents.
• Users may also export schedules in CSV format allowing for integration in powerful spread sheet programs like Microsoft Excel or File Maker Pro.
• ATS FTP export utility. Users may now export built schedules directly to remote directories using a built in FTP client.

Configuration Options

• Extendable Plugin Interface. Users may extend the inherent ATS scheduling algorithms using the ATS Swap Tool Utility to conform to various individual situations and can save those adjustments to an ATS script file to be loaded for future use with schedules with similar constraint patterns. Through plugins users may infuse scheduling adjustments directly into the schedule build process, prior to any hard constraint adjustments. Plugins may be created and saved in a portable ATS .tsScript (XML) file and stored in the ATS plugins folder to be accessed directly into the creation process. Using plugins, scheduling flexibility is greatly enhanced creating limitless automatic scheduling possibilities for the imaginative user. Works particularly well with ATS scheduling templates. Several sample plugins are provided as examples of what can be achieved
• Enhanced ATS Swap Tool Utility to swap home and away game advantages, and game pairings, and objects within specified games. Simply append a modification to the a list and the swap utility will automatically execute actions in the list. Using the swap utility an execution order can be defined so as to set up a choreography of adjustments within the utility which can be saved to a ATS .tsScript file for repeated re-use within the plugin interface integrating it into the schedule build for specified schedules.
• Schedule templates may be created that will allow users to quickly design completed project schedules before knowing the object details of the project. As the details of the schedules become more clear, users may fill in the information directly into the ATS user interface to be reflected and updated in all aspects of objects and pre-built schedules. Users may use the ATS templates as a means of quickly understanding what the possible scheduling outcomes will be, without knowing the exact details of the final schedule.
• Time Shifting Utility to included specified schedule indices as well as games that occur on specific days or days of the week to automatically batch shift games times.
• Added the user option to minimize consecutive home and away games.
• Live updating of schedule objects to allow for last minute replacements or edits of team and location information to be automatically refreshed in previously built schedules.
• New program preferences allowing users greater flexibility and control in the schedule output formats. Users may now export HTML schedules in various color schemes as well as fonts and font sizes allowing authors the ability to create a host of intuitive style differences making ATS output ideal for publishing on the web or for hard copy reproductions. Using these choices, varying designs can be achieved to differentiate between clubs, leagues, divisions, tournaments, etc.
• New user choices with regards to adding schedule content for individual teams, locations and officials in the output files.
• Provides support for creation, management, and reports of game officials and officiating crews.
• Users have the option to allow or disallow 'double header' games when managing constraints.
• Roster player entries can be displayed as active or inactive within the roster list. Inactive entries are automatically exluded from published line up forms and HTML representations of the rosters.
• Includes a user choice to append schedule author information as footers to each schedule's output page.

Usability

• It can instantaneously cancel or un-cancel games.
• Email client integrated directly into the scheduler so that users may instantly assemble email messages ( in only two clicks ) to targeted recipients associated with games to a particular schedule, date, game, or selected group of games. All objects (team contacts, officials, location contacts, players) associated with those user defined games can be quickly notified in the event of a game cancellations, or changes in game or games' schedule.
• The email client supports multi-part mime types (attachments) so schedules or object data can be distributed via email as well. A nice alternative to distributing hard copies by hand or via snail mail. The mailer supports scheduled mailings so if only limited mailings are allowed, it can be delivered over seconds, minutes, hours, or days. It has support for prompted or unprompted authenticated mailings as well.
• Contextual menu support facilitating frequent time constraint data entry
• Great flexibility with regards to editing, adding and removing schedule dates after already created.
• Users may make copies of projects directly in the Project Viewer Panel and work on those copies to preserve original projects.

Documentation

• Full blown searchable, context sensitive ATS on-line help.
• Installation READ-ME
• Supplemental FAQ