1. How do I get an end-to-end solution for my organization?
2. How does your software licensing work?
3. Do you donate or offer discounts to non-profit organizations?
4. Can I transfer my single machine license to someone else?
5. What is the best way to put my schedules on the Internet?
6. How much do upgrades cost and how will we get them?
7. How much does product support cost?
8. I’ve tried all of the other sport schedulers, yours is amazing. How does it work?
9. Why aren't your Game Scheduler products browser-based?
10. When are you going to solve the rest of our problems?
11. What are the system requirements for your software?
12. What is your privacy policy?
    

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How do I get an end-to-end solution for my organization?

To utilize all the solutions that our company offers, you will have to do three things:

1. Get an annual subscription to the Vicid Website Manager. This gives your league everything it needs to maintain a professional web presence. To get started on your Vicid website, select a plan and sign up for the 30-day free trial. You will receive an email telling you how to login and configure to your trial site. Once you are comfortable with the result, use the purchase/renew option in the Admin panel to turn it live.
   
   You may upload game schedules to your website via the Vicid Website system. You may also manage rain-outs, scores, stats, and umpire assignment inside of Vicid. However, Vicid is not designed to generate the initial schedules for you. (An explanation as to why this is the case can be found in FAQ #9).
   
   
2. Generate your game schedules using Sports Scheduler 2003 and the Tournament Scheduler 2005. A Discount Bundle (available on this website's purchase page) will give you licenses to both products and is absolutely the best way for you to create your league's regular season schedules as well as automate your end of season tournaments.
   
   To get started, you must first download and install the 30-day free trials. Then when you purchase, your license keys will be emailed to you. Those keys will unlock the free trials into their full versions.
   
   
3. Last, but not least, enroll in our League Merchant program. This will enable Online Registration so your participants can register and pay securely via your website. To do this, first you must fill out a Registration Inquiry form. Then you will receive a rate quote and a link to a League Merchant application. Once you fill out this application and you are approved, you can login to your LeagueUSA Online account to configure your organization's registration forms and fees. If you are a Vicid customer, an Online Registration page will automatically appear on your website when the League Merchant application is approved. If you are using another website system, or have custom built your own, then you will receive HTML code snippets to insert into your existing website.
   
   Then, as your organization's registration season progresses, the Online Registration system will provide you with daily deposits direct to your bank account as well as much needed communication tools, registration reports, and team rostering.
   
   

How does your software licensing work?
It depends on the product(s) you are using:

• Vicid Website Manager is subscription based, generally paid for annually. There are two main types of website plans, League and Team. To get the most out of Vicid's functionality (i.e. statistics & news feeds), league sites are usually specific to a single sport. Member teams may either pay for their own site or use a 'shared' site, which has integrated data (a.k.a. 'shared' data) with their parent league's site. Shared site plans provide the ultimate in functionality and are typically purchased at bulk-discount rates by the league.
  
  
• Online Registration is separate and distinct from our Vicid Website Management system. While it integrates nicely with Vicid, it is designed so that it can be utilized by any website. To turn it on, a league must sign-up for our League Merchant program. There is no other cost.
  
  
• Our game scheduling products are desktop (not browser-based) applications.  Thus, licensing is done on a per machine basis. Purchasing one license gives you a registration code that will unlock the free trial version into the full version of the software on one machine. Purchasing two licenses gives you two registration codes that will allow you to unlock the free trial of our software on two machines.
  
  Licensing is currently offered as either 6-month lease or as a full purchase. The difference being that with the 6-month lease your license code expires after 6 months. Once expired, the software is rendered unusable until you purchase again. Conversely, with a full purchase you receive a license code that permanently unlocks the free trial.
  
  If there are multiple people who do the scheduling for your association, then you will need multiple licenses. When you purchase more than one at the same time, you will receive a multiple license discount. There are also Discount Bundles which will give you licenses for both the Sports Scheduler and the Tournament Scheduler to provide an additional cost savings.

Do you donate or offer discounts to non-profit organizations?
We don't offer deals to "special" customers because all of our customers are special. We understand and agree that sports programs are a great way to build communities and teach kids life skills. In fact, the vast majority of our customers are non-profit organizations who do just that. Fiscally speaking, we can't donate copies to all of them. As far as discount pricing, the regular price of a Sports Scheduler 2003 six-month lease is only $39.95. We feel that, even though we make this price available to everybody, it should still qualify as a discounted price.

Can I transfer my single machine license to someone else?
Yes. If we have you listed as a primary user for your organization and you are handing off the responsibility of scheduling to someone else, please fill out a registration transfer form online or give us a call to inform us of the details. This helps us track each user for customer support reasons. It also keeps your organization's license legal.


What is the best way to put my schedules on the Internet?
The Tournament Scheduler 2005 and the Sports Scheduler 2003 both produce Internet friendly output. When you are ready, simply choose the type of schedule report you want and then ask the program to generate it in HTML. Once you have done this, you can have your webmaster put those HTML files on your website and link to it from your home page.

If you find that keeping your website updated with the latest scores and rankings cumbersome, then you should try out Vicid.com. We designed this product to automate everything for you. It is a very easy way for you to manage a website. More to the point, you may upload your season game schedule from the Sports Scheduler 2003 to be published on your website in only a couple of clicks.

NOTE: There are a variety of other premium website services who claim to work with our scheduling products. Unfortunately, we don't have an official affiliate program for them to participate in. So they don't always get notified when modifications are made to our various export formats. This may cause compatibility problems. We don't mind if you choose to use a competing service. However, please understand that you currently do so at your own risk.

How much do upgrades cost and how will we get them?
Minor updates and fixes to the Sports Scheduler 2003 and Tournament Scheduler 2005 are distributed for free. Users with specific problems are issued patches for download as soon as fixes become available. We also send out general product update notices twice a year informing all customers of recent fixes and enhancements.

You can receive the same bi-annual newsletter that our licensed customers receive by subscribing here:

Newsletter Signup: 

How much does product support cost?
Absolutely nothing. Although, we do require that you are running the latest version of our software in order to receive support. We do this because we value working with our customers so that we can make sure that our software continues to suit their needs. We also like to know where frequent points of confusion are so that we can attempt to resolve those issues in future releases.

We also have online discussion forums where you may find answers to your questions. Topic discussed include the Sports Scheduler 2003, Tournament Scheduler 2005, League Merchant/Online Registration and website services. If you cannot find your answers there, you can open a support ticket with our support department.

If you speak with any of our current customers, you will learn that user feedback is strongly encouraged at all levels.

I’ve tried all of the other sport schedulers, yours is amazing. How does it work?
We get this question a lot from programmers and engineers who volunteer to help with their league’s schedules. A few have even tried writing their own sports scheduler at some point in the past. It’s to these ever-curious people that this response is directed...

Sorry to say, we aren’t allowed to tell you how it works. However, we can tell you that many Computer Science PhDs and Combinatorial Mathematicians have the exact same question.

LeagueUSA, Inc. is the first and only known entity with a scheduling algorithm powerful enough to consider all of a league’s restrictions, special requests, and facilities. Then still be able to produce a perfect schedule in a reasonable time span.

In the past, many software companies as well as reputable universities have failed to solve this "Sports Scheduling Problem". As you already know, other companies have put out products that only half work and most have since disappeared. To the same point, university researchers, in hopes of earning a name for themselves, have only been able to classify various scheduling algorithms to be NP-Complete. Which is basically a scientific way of saying their scheduling programs’ would take a really really long time to run, like weeks or even months. Thus, their attempts would never be practical for commercial use.

You can now understand why it has taken us many years to build this scheduling engine for you. There are a lot of dynamically derived math formulas and complex artificially intelligent algorithms that those other people never even considered. Believe me, you don’t really want to know the ugly details! So, in good humor, act like a normal human being for once in your life and just enjoy the fact that you don't have to do your schedules by hand again this year.

Why aren't your Game Scheduler products browser-based?
Lately, this has definitely been the most frequently asked question. It seems that a few other companies who primarily focus on Online Registration services have rolled 'game scheduling' into their fully browser-based solutions in the hope of gaining an edge on their competition. After all, 'game scheduling' is usually on that long list of things that leagues wish to automate.

Superficially, managing registration info and game schedules in one spot makes plenty of sense. Information collected during the registration process is vital to the game scheduling process. Like 'how many teams do you have?', 'what are they called?', and 'who is coaching them?' However, there is a serious problem with running a scheduling application on an Internet server. Game scheduling requires intensive computation. It would cost us an absurd amount of money to buy servers fast enough to handle Spring scheduling season. Imagine generating a schedule that avoids 200,000 conflict requests and juggling 500,000 game start times without the computer hanging for a minute or two so that it can think. Customers would see 'Error 408: Request Timeout' or 'Server Not Responding' in their browsers quite often.

So, you are probably wondering, if that is really what would happen, then how do those other companies do it? The answer is, they really don't. They provide fairly simple template based solutions. You don't get the raw power and flexibility offered by a real game scheduling engine. Only the smallest leagues can, or will ever be able to, use a browser-based 'game scheduling' product.

We will likely never live to see the day where it makes economic sense to provide our game scheduler as an Internet service. You may be thinking, well maybe you could queue up the scheduling tasks so that they don't all generate at the same time. However, if you continue to think about it, then you should see that the proper solution really has to do with seamlessly importing registration data (via an XML feed) into a desktop-based game scheduler.

When are you going to solve the rest of our problems?
We are constantly evaluating and prioritizing all of your requests.  We appreciate your dedication to us and intend to reward you with continued innovations. If you're new to us and you want to let us know your personal wish list, feel free to email us at . We do listen.


What are the system requirements for your software?
For the Sports Scheduler 2003:

For the Tournament Scheduler 2005:

 

What is your privacy policy?
We do our best to keep all information about our customers private.  However, there are occasions when we will share. For example, if we have a pending customer who wants to speak with one of our existing customers before they buy. We will try to find someone local to the pending customer or in a comparable job role (i.e. YMCA Recreation Director). Then we ask for permission to release their contact information to the pending customer. When, and only when, that permission is given by you will we share your contact information.

Regarding information about your league participants, which we may collect on your behalf during Online Registration, we do not sell or share that data with any organization outside of yours. As clarified in the contract you sign when you enter our League Merchant program, you own the data stored in the registration system on your behalf. We simply provide you tools to collect and manage it.

Unlike many larger companies, we do not have an extensive partner network where information sharing is required. As we may choose to grow our partner network to focus on specific strengths in the future, this privacy policy may change.