Friday 10 July 2015

New League Management System goes live

Today we're going live with the new League Management System, which has received a large overhaul from the previous version. It incorporates a lot of suggestions we've received over the last few years and should be much nicer to use. To get there you must use the new My EBU, which is the updated version of the Members Area. Log in to there with your usual username and password and you'll find the Leagues section under Utilities. Much of the functionality should be familiar, with a new presentation, so we hope it will be intuitive and self-explanatory for users of the old LMS. This post will go through a few of the changes, and in the next few weeks we'll release some more detailed notes for users new to the system. The changes are listed below.

1. You can now have more than one captain of a team. Captains have all the usual powers to submit scores, add players and remove players but only the league organiser can add and remove captains.

2. League organisers can now set up triple and quadruple round-robins.

3. Adjustments/penalties can now be applied to a team as a whole, not just to a specific match. Click the edit icon (the pencil and paper one) by the team name to find this. 4. League titles are now split between the title bit and the date bit, to make it easier to group similar leagues together in the results pages. See the image above. While transferring the data from the old system, I tried to split the titles where possible, but league organisers may want to check their settings to make sure that it's all correct. I suggest you use the format above e.g. "2014-15" with a hyphen, to keep things consistent. You will find this setting by clicking the edit icon by the appropriate league in the list of leagues. The division title can be changed in the individual division page.

5. You will also see three new options in the screenshot above. Show match line-ups in public results means that the public results pages show who played in each match (by clicking on the match result in the grid). We think this is a nice feature and so encourage league organisers to check this box, but realise that some will want to keep this private so have disabled it by default.

6. You can now prevent the registration of players in more than one team, either for just that one division or for the entire league. This won't retrospectively remove players already registered in more than one team - just prevent further registrations.

7. You can now clear a match of a result if you made a mistake and edited the wrong one, so no longer have to mess about setting scores to 0-0.

8. The masterpoint settings for a league can now be entered at any time - not just during finalisation. You'll find these by clicking on the edit icon by the division title in the division page.

We've transferred over all the leagues from the old LMS to the new LMS, but there are some in there which were just test leagues and still need to be deleted. We'll be doing this as soon as we can, but if you notice any still there after a couple of weeks just let us know and we'll get rid of it.

I hope you find the changes are an improvement and, as always, if you have any questions/problems just contact me or leave a comment.

Thursday 25 June 2015

Beta release of My EBU

Today we're pleased to release a sneak preview of our new members area, now renamed My EBU. It's not finished and there are still some missing features, but we wanted to share some of the new things with everyone, particular those involving the NGS. This blog post will go through a few of the details.

Navigation

The first thing you'll notice is that My EBU looks quite different from the old Members Area. We're using more modern tools to develop and style things, and it should hopefully function well on phones and tablets too. Navigation is done through the menu along the top of the page or, if you're on a narrow screen, through the hamburger icon in the top right. Clicking on a menu item will show that page in the main window, or drop down some more options.

Sessions

The sessions list now shows your partner's name, to help you remember which event it is, and it fixes a few issues we had with the scores from Swiss Pairs and some teams events. You can also click on the NGS par score (the +/- value) to see how many boards were played and, in the case of a teams event, what your pair scored. Clicking on the session name will bring up the results, along with the NGS changes of every pair. One big change in the results page is that for a teams event you can now click on "Show Pairs" in order to see the ranking for the pairs (usually scored by Cross-IMPs), and how their grade changed. Finally, there's now a facility to filter the sessions list which makes it much easier to find that session you're looking for. Just type in the name of the club, or your partner, or even the session ID if you know it, and the list will show only the sessions that match the criteria.

NGS

The NGS information page has also gained a lot of new information. The graph has been spruced up (try dragging your mouse over it to zoom in) and the partnership list now shows your partner's grade, to save you having to look it up in the public area. The Latest Updates table should also help answer a lot of queries we get about how your grade is changing. It could previously get a bit confusing if sessions were deleted, or rescored, or if old sessions started getting expired from three years ago. This line-by-line breakdown of what's been happening should hopefully clear up a lot of these things.

Reorganisation

A few things have moved around a bit. The electronic version of the magazine now comes under the Magazines menu and if you're looking for your account balance with the EBU, you can find this under Credit History in the Accounts menu. Oh, and if you want to log out, you can find this under the Account menu at the far right.

Clubs

For club/county administrators, things have been similarly revamped, including the same much-improved sessions list. One notable new feature is Absent Members which you can find under the Reports menu. We often get clubs asking us for better ways to manage their membership list and cull lapsed members and this should provide a good way to track them down. Clubs can also now see their balance with the EBU, in the Credit History page via the Accounts menu.

Leagues

The League Management System that many clubs and counties use has been totally overhauled to work with the new My EBU, and we'll be making this available very soon, once we've transferred the data across.

All feedback welcome

As I said, this isn't a finished product yet and you will notice some key things missing, but these will be added in the next few months. With this "beta" release we wanted to get it out there for some member feedback, so if you find anything broken or behaving peculiarly then drop us a message or leave a comment and we'll take a look. If things do go wrong, just go back to the old Members Area which will stick around until everything has moved across.