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Release notes for RealDropzone Office version 09.06.02.00

RealSkydiving — 2010-01-27T00:09:31Z

09.06.02.00

Fixed vrd_UserProductDetail to display Shuttle bus DisplayName instead of description for ShuttleDisplay column. This effects a variety of areas but the primary concern was the value listed in the Tandem Reservations form.

Fixed Customer Detail form: Phone Type drop downs and gender drop downs no longer allow free text entry but instead must be used to select a particular value. Previously typing an invalid entry instead of selecting resulted in an error.

Added a search filter to the Shuttle Bus selection form.

Made Shuttle Bus selection form sizable.

Added “Select All” and “Select None” buttons to Shuttle Bus Stop Edit form.

We are now coloring the shuttle bus column in the tandem reservations form as green.

Notes

whitney — 2009-08-07T17:59:28Z

HI Matt...

Just a note about notes. When making notes on the resevation form, when you highlight to make notes for the whole group, it only makes notes for one person.

Also...not sure if we noted that we need some system for rainchecks. I know that you were working on it, but I am not sure if we included it on the email I sent you.

Thanks Matt!

Whitney

Feedback from the weekend

mattchristenson — 2009-06-08T20:05:03Z

This weekend I added the "Staff Manifested" Window which allows you to sort by instructor or flight and see which instructors on on which flight without any other information. At this point the window is read only and does not support drag-drop so you'll need to continue to use the "Available Instructors" window to actually manifest them, however after I receive feedback on the design of this window I will consider adding the drag-drop functionality as well.

Please let me know how this window seems to work for you.

whitney wrote

Manifesting Tandems:

If we could think about highlighting the tandem instructors names on the loads on the manifest overview. When manifesting on paper, we look at the prior load to see who was on it...and I know that they are highlighted on the side as to who is available, but it just seems easier and more efficient to be able to show departed loads and get a quick, highlighted view of the instructors who were on the prior load.

Manifest Monitor

whitney — 2009-05-09T22:00:50Z

I have had some feedback, particularly from the loaders, asking if we caould have numbers next to the names on the manifest monitor, in order to see how many are on the load total. Thanks Matt

Deposits

whitney — 2009-04-16T17:47:09Z

Hi Matt...

when taking a deposit on the phone, could you make a radio box asking if it is partial payment or in full.

Also:

David would like some type of quick report for tandem totals, video totals, afp jumps within a selected period.

Thank you!!!

Receive the error: There is already an open DataReader associated with this Command...

mattchristenson — 2009-04-04T20:04:01Z

You may receive the following Error. This was experienced at Skydive Chicago on the Manifest Monitor website, however it's possible that you receive it in RealDropzone as well:

There is already an open DataReader associated with this Command which must be closed first.

The cause for this error is described in the following forum post:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/adodotnetdataproviders/thread/78d3989a-8975-4930-998d-1eb907966f57/

The fix is to include the string "MultipleActiveResultSets=True" in your connection string.

If you experience this error please notify us and we will resolve the issue promptly. This will be considered a bug and so time required to fix it will not be reduced from your annual support hours.

What kind of hardware will I need for the “Manifest Monitor” component of RealDropzone?

RealSkydiving — 2009-02-13T23:01:45Z

One of the great benefits that RealDropzone provides is a very flexible, well organized, and easy to read “Manifest Monitor” component. This component is hosted as a local website. Because it is a website, it means that in addition to using it to share information on a public monitor, it can be viewed by anyone with a wireless laptop, or even on a broadband capable mobile device such as an iPhone or PocketPC.

There are a variety of ways that you may choose to display information publically at your dropzone. At the very minimum you will want a monitor by your tandem gear-up area so that you can communicate flight and student-instructor pairing information to instructors and students without any extra time required by manifest employees.

You may additionally choose to display student (AFF / AFP / Static Line, IAD, etc.) instructor pairing information, and experienced jumper manifests. You can communicate this information on the same monitor, or on separate monitors. Each monitor can be configured to display different data.

You will need a computer for each manifest monitor you want to have. This computer connects to the monitor and displays information by running a web browser in full-screen mode. It should be mounted in such a way that a keyboard and mouse are accessible for configuration, but hidden from jumpers tampering with it. The great part about this computer is that it does not have to have very much in the way of processor speed and ram. Any computer fast enough to visit a web page is fast enough, so many of you will have computers that have been sitting in the closet for years that can be used for this purpose. Otherwise, you can pick low performance computers (even laptops) for less than $400 these days.

The size and resolution of the monitor that you purchase will depend on where you plan to mount the display. If you happen to have a low def monitor system in place already that uses standard TVs, we can feed all of those lines with the same PC, but I don’t recommend purchasing this old equipment or technology – you would only use it if it was already in place from a previous solution.

Most of the time, the lower HDTV standard (720p) will work fine, this will allow one column of data and about 23 manifest lines per page. Because student-instructor-videographer pairing is done on one line of the display, this means you’ll usually be able to have multiple flights of data on the same page without rotation.

If your HDTV will be at your tandem gear-up or waiting areas only, and will be mounted at eye level, a monitor between 26-28 inches should be plenty. If you’re going to mount this above eye level for a larger viewing area, you’ll want to go to a size of around 32-52 inches.

If you get into the larger range, you may also choose to display two columns of data at the same time, side by side. You will want to use the higher HDTV resolution of 1080i in order to accomplish this. A resolution of 1080i will allow you to display 2 columns of 32 rows each. Because student-instructor-videographer information is grouped on a single row, this would allow you to display 3-6 loads of super otter flights without paging!

Keep in mind that in addition to the TV’s you’re likely going to want some kind of mounting device, which can be a home built shelf, or there are wall mounts available between $50-$200 in price, depending on the size and features of the mount.

Additionally, if your monitor will be in an area that sees a lot of sunlight, you’ll want some form of light shielding, generally a home built solution is best for this, however there are commercial solutions available at a price.

Below is a list of HDTV’s sold by www.TigerDirect.com on 02/13/2009, which should give you a ball-park idea of what price ranges you would be looking at.

Westinghouse 26” LCD HDTV : $299.00
Toshiba 32” 720p LCD HDTV : $499.99
Toshiba 37” 720p LCD HDTV : $599.99
Vizio 47” 1080p LCD HDTV (refurbished) : $899.99
Sharp 52” 1080p LCD HDTV : $1,299.99
Mitsubishi 73” 1080p DLP HDTV (this one isn’t flat) : $1,999.99

What kind of Monitors will I need to run RealDropzone?

RealSkydiving — 2009-02-13T22:16:21Z

The lowest resolution that RealDropzone supports is 1024x768. Any monitor that was purchased in the last 8 years is sure to support this resolution. That having been said, it is STRONGLY recommended that you have a much higher resolution for your PCs, at the very least for the PC that will be handling manifesting. RealDropzone has been developed to provide a very high level of flexibility in what you can see on the screen at any given point in time. Size panel windows can be “floated”, windows can be configured to be displayed side by side, and for those working on a smaller monitor, and panels can be “unpinned” so that they only appear when you hover over them.

If you already have a decent monitor, give it a try before you look into purchasing anything new.

If you’re going to be purchasing a new monitor, I personally recommend a resolution of 1920x1200 for the workstation being used for manifest. I’ve been told by my peers that this may be overkill, but I’m a firm believer that more digital real-estate means more efficiency, and at the prices you can purchase monitors these days, I feel it’s really hard to say no.

Because 1920x1200 is such a high resolution, you’ll want to make sure to purchase a large monitor; I recommend 22-24 inches. Anything larger can be harder to fit on a desk.

As of writing this article (2/13/2009), www.TigerDirect.com has the following monitors on sale which I think are a great value. My favorite pick is the 24 inch Acer, this is the monitor that I was demonstrating on at the 2009 PIA Symposium.

Acer H233Hbmid 23” LCD Monitor – 1920x1080 res : $219.99
Gateway FHD2401 24” Widescreen Monitor (refurbished) – 1920x1200 res : $249.96
Acer X243Wbd 24” Widescreen LCD Monitor – 1920x1200 res : $299.99
I-Inc iF-281DPB 28” Widescreen LCD Monitor – 1920x1200 res : $329.99

If you have any further questions, don’t hesitate to ask us before making any hardware purchases. We would be happy to do a little shopping for you and make a recommendation based on current prices.

I received an email saying: "An attempt was made to access a locked out user account"

RealSkydiving — 2009-01-30T18:50:57Z

A security mechanism is in place that only allows 5 invalid password attempts for a user name before that user account becomes locked out for 10 minutes. This mechanism has been put in place to protect against "Brute Force" attacks in which a robot attempts to guess 10,000 random passwords per second until it finds a correct password.

In versions 8.x.x there was a bug that did not correctly notify the user that their account had been locked out, and so many users would try over and over again to login. This has been resolved in versions 9.0.0 and higher.

If a user forgets their password they can always click on the "Forgot Password" link to have their password emailed to them. Additionally, the default of 5 invalid password attempts can be changed to 15 to help eliminate a users exposure to this security feature.

What kind of server will I need to have to run RealDropzone™?

RealSkydiving — 2009-01-26T16:35:14Z

If you already have a server there is a good chance that we will be able to use that server to host the office database for RealDropzone™ the only requirement is that you have Microsoft SQL Server 2005 or 2008, workgroup edition or higher. Additionally, you’ll want about 1GB of memory available exclusively for SQL Server and about 10GB of disk space to handle both the RealDropzone database, and an external USB hard drive used for local backups.

It is very important that *QUALITY* hardware is purchased for your server. I cannot stress enough how critical it is to not go with discount hardware or home built machines. You can go with any solution you want for your workstations, but the server is effectively a single point of failure for the software running at the office.

Pricing for hardware changes all the time, we recommend DELL servers and will assist you in pricing one on their website with the specifications that you will need. (please note that you can ussually save 10% on dell equipment just by calling them and haggling the price below the one on the website)

Server prices will range from $1,800 to $3,500 depending on the size of your business. Some things to consider when purchasing a server:

BUY THE SUPPORT PACKAGE! DELL offers an extended 3 year on-site warentee for just a few hundred dollars. This is well worth it because it means that if anything goes wrong with your device that you will not have to pay to get it fixed, and that it will be fixed the next day.

You must have a Microsoft operating system and licenses for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 or 2008. We recommend purchasing Microsoft Small Business Server 2008 Premium with 5 client access licenses because this will provide you with Microsoft Exchange and some other useful server tools at a discounted price.

Get a server with hardware RAID! These add a significant amount to the price of the server and many people want to skip this purchase. Hardware RAID controllers are able to mirror the data on two harddrives at the hardware level without effecting performance. Because hard drives are the one device that is most prone to failure, this is critical to keeping your business up and going. With a properly configured hardware RAID controller you can have a hard drive fail completely and will continue to be able to use the server without trouble while you replace the failed device. This beats being offline for a busy saturday!

We do not sell hardware but we would be happy to walk you through purchasing a server from DELL or HP by pricing it on their website, and then calling to haggle down the price for you.

Where and how is your website being hosted?

RealSkydiving — 2009-01-25T21:49:10Z

In order to offer our software solution as cost effectively as possible, we require that we host all websites using RealDropzone components. This enables us to dramatically reduce support costs and provide you with best value for every dollar spent.

All RealDropzone™ websites are hosted in virtual machines running on a physical server leased from Rackspace (www.Rackspace.com) and managed by The Corymb Group (www.CorymbGroup.com).

Specifications of the physical facility in the Dallas Fort Worth area can be found in this RackSpace document (accurate as of 01/15/2009):

http://www.RealDropzone.com/portals/0/DocumentFiles/Data%20Center%20Specs%20DFW.pdf

The physical machine that all RealDropzone™ websites are hosted on as of 01/15/2009 has the following specifications:

Dell PowerEdge 2950 III
Dual Quad Core Intel Xeon L5335 Processors (64bit, 2GHz, 1333MHz bus speed, 8MB L2 Cache)
16GB Fully Buffered Memory
6x300 GB (15k RPM) 3.5 SAS Drives in a RAID 5 configuration
Redundant Power supplies
64bit Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Standard Authenticated

All physical servers at this location are protected by a Cisco ASA 5510 Firewall supporting 300Mbps Aggregated connectivity and 130,000 Concurrent Connections, and featuring stateful packet inspection.

Each dropzone will be issued its own dedicated IP address.

The only ports open on your web server will be 80 (HTTP), 443 (HTTPS), and 3389 (Remote Desktop).

All website content files are stored on the web server itself; however DotNetNuke and RealDropzone™ database information is on a separate database server in its own demilitarized zone not publically accessible to the internet.

Both web and data servers are protected with up-to-date Symantec Anti-Virus software.

Our entire hosting configuration conforms to PCI Compliance requirements dictated by the Payment Card Industry for accepting all credit card types online.

The “Virtual” nature of our servers allows us the most flexibility in disaster recovery and scalability, as if our physical machine begins to become overwhelmed with tasks, we can quickly move the virtual machine from one physical server to another without having to do any re-installation or configuration.

Can I download a demo version of RealDropzone™ to try it before I buy it?

RealSkydiving — 2009-01-25T17:03:46Z

Because RealDropzone™ is such an extensive solution that covers both the online and office aspects of your business it is not realistic for us to put together an effective demo version of the product. The entire solution requires a website hosted remotely on our servers, and a local server running Microsoft SQL Server 2005 setup to replicate data between your office server and our web server.

Additionally, many of the activities that happen in RealDropzone are time sensitive. Consider a single Tandem Skydiver’s experience with your organization:

Customer clicks on a banner ad January 1st and discovers your website, but does not create an account or make a purchase.
Customer talks to friends later that weekend, and decides that making a Skydive would be a lot of fun.
Customer returns to your website on January 5th, and registers for an account – that account becomes associated with the original affiliateId identified through the banner ad so that the proper marketing channel can be credited for any purchases.
Customer makes a tandem reservation on your website on January 5th. He creates a group reservation for March 1st at noon for 5 people, but only pays for his own $50 deposit online.
Customer’s friends use the group number assigned to customer’s group, and add themselves to the group, also leaving a $50 deposit. Some customers do this over the telephone and so do so online.
Early on March 1st, jumping staff members arrive to work and check in. Experience waiver’s, repack dates, and other staff expiration dates (medicals, etc.) are checked at the time of check-in.
On March 1st, 5 group members check in, having already paid their $50 deposits. They must now pay for the full price of their ticket. Because all 5 group members paid deposits 48 hours in advance, a group rate for groups of 5 or more is given as the total price, and customers proceed through the check-in process where waivers are signed, money is collected, and ID’s are checked to verify birth dates. They are then sent to class.
Upon returning from class, group members appear in the list of tandem students to be manifested. Students are dragged and dropped onto flights, and instructors and videographers are assigned to each by dragging and dropping from the staff windows, which have been populated based on which staff members have checked in for the day.
After their flight takes off, the customers status changes to indicate they have made a jump with you on that day.
On March 2nd, at 12:01AM an email is sent to participants who make their first tandem jump with you, offering a discount on a second jump if they purchase it during a given time frame. They are also offered a discount on a T-Shirt if they fill out a short survey of their experience.
On March 4th, one passenger reads this email and uses your website to sign up for a second Tandem Jump, they are given special pricing on the website for their second jump.
On March 15th, a report is run that sees that a particular marketing affiliate who has been posting banner ads for you has led to the purchase of 5 tandem skydivers. According to the contract you signed with them you pay them a sales commission of $15 per jump, or $75. The banner was clicked on January 1st, deposits received between January 5th and February 26th. Final payments were received on March 1st and jumps made at that time.
On August 23rd of that year, one of the passengers has a birthday, and is emailed an invitation to skydive again at $20 off if they come on their birthday. They are also given the opportunity for groups larger than 4 people to save an additional $10 each.
On August 24th, that passenger decides he/she does not want to receive email correspondences and clicks on a link in the email that removes them from the special offers emailing list.

This list should help identify why it is not easy to see the value of the product through a demo installation because the variable of time is needed for an appropriate demonstration.

Additionally, the time and resources that goes into setting up a new installation is too significant to offer any kind of a free trial. The license fees that we require up front only cover half of the time and resources that go into implementing a dropzone to run RealDropzone™. Each new installation is a long term investment on our part. We put considerable resources into the product and its implementation at your dropzone knowing that you will continue to feel it is the best solution for your dropzone for years to come, and only through years of license fees do we see a return on our investment.

For these reasons we have put together a number of training videos which can be found on our website at http://www.RealDropzone.com, by watching these training videos in order you will see how your dropzone will benefit from using the software chronologically through time.

If you are still hesitant about running RealDropzone™ at your organization and would like to see it in action, we can schedule an on-site visit to Skydive Chicago where you can witness the software running in real-time and see how it streamlines their operation first hand.

If you have additional questions about the software product, you may contact us with any questions.

Why can’t I use my existing email address to send emails from my website?

RealSkydiving — 2009-01-24T21:28:20Z

Email was one of the very first technologies brought to the Internet, it dates back to the 1970s (http://www.livinginternet.com/e/ei.htm ).

Unfortunately for all of us, the standards still in use today were created at a time when computer security was an afterthought, after all, anyone with enough education to use a computer should be educated enough to know right from wrong and not have any interest in malicious activities, right?

Because of emails roots, any server can send an email from any address. There are no mechanisms in place at the transmission layer of email technology that authorize a server to be able to send mail from a specific domain.

As soon as AOL, and Compserv, and Prodigy tied their proprietary messaging services into the public “Information Super Highway” in 1996, email SPAM has become a big problem.

Since then, because no law enforcement agency has been able to police this effectively, there has been an ongoing battle between spammers and anti-spam technology.

One of the mechanisms put in place by many email hosts to identify if an email is spam or not is to attempt to see if the server sending that email has been granted permission from a special kind of DNS record. These DNS records are controlled by the owner of a particular domain name.

By purchasing your website domain name, you’re able to authorize our email server to send mail on behalf of your domain, so that anti-spam filters will not flag the outgoing messages as spam. This means that all email sent from your website will need to come from an email address that uses the same domain name. For example, emails sent by the server hosting www.ModelDropzone.com from the address onlineSupport@ModelDropzone.com are less likely to be blocked by anti-spam technology than an email sent from ModelDropzone@gmail.com.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t continue to use your existing email address. We can set up your email server to forward all mail coming from onlineSupport@ModelDropzone.com to any email address that you’d like, and you can then reply to emails using that address.

There are some other mechanisms that we could use to send email on behalf of another address, however this mechanism seems to have had the best results in making sure that emails are not marked as spam and rejected by a recipient.

Why do customers need a Verification Code emailed to them?

RealSkydiving — 2009-01-24T20:59:03Z

In order for a customer to log onto your RealDropzone™ website for the first time, they must enter a verification code which has been emailed to them after the registration wizard. I have received a number of requests for this feature to be removed, however there are some really good reasons to implement this system that are not immediately obvious.

The first reason is that this is a test to see if the customer’s email box is protected by a spam filter that will not allow your emails to be received. If a customer cannot receive emails from you they will not receive email confirmations of tandem reservations, or receipts for products being purchased. In the case of Gift Certificates this email contains the code that will need to be used to redeem the Gift Certificate, and in the case of Tandem Reservations these emails provide group numbers, times, and information they will need to know about how to prepare for their jumps.

All of our emails are sent from legitimate servers that have been secured from abuse from spammers and authorized with DNS entries on your domain. However even with these measures in place, many different anti-spam filters exist and it is impossible to know for sure that your emails will make it through.

The second very important reason for this verification code is to prevent robots from signing up on your website electronically in order to post spam advertisements into forums and other applications that allow users to submit data which will then be displayed to the public. Malicious robots are very present on the internet and are consistently looking for vulnerabilities that allow hackers access to use your web servers for personal gain. Spamming is one of the more profitable malicious activities and is very hard to police, and so protective measures must be incorporated to the website architecture itself.

If you receive an email from a customer who is frustrated because they did not receive a verification code and cannot sign on to your website, you will need to respond to their email with an alternate email address (such as a gmail or yahoo address). You can use the following form as a template to your response:

Hello {CustomerName},

We’re really sorry that you’re having trouble on our website. We use this email verification system to be sure that we can send emails to customers before they make a purchase with us. This is very important because we email receipts for purchase and these receipts sometimes contain codes necessary to redeem services, or provide information about how to prepare for a Skydive.

It is likely that a spam filter has blocked the email that we sent. Please check your ‘Junk Mail’ folder for an email from {DZEmailAddress}. If you cannot find the email there, please add {DZEmailAddress} to your ‘Safe Senders’ list so that you are able to receive emails from us.

If you’re still having trouble signing on to our website, you can always call our offices at {DZTelephone} during normal business hours, and we would be happy to take your reservation over the phone. If you receive this message while our office is closed, you can respond to this email with your telephone number requesting a call as soon as our office opens, or leave a message on our Voice Mail system.

We look forward to jumping with you!

{DZCompanyName} {DZEmailAddress} {DZTelephone}

Cannot start RealDropzone Office: Exception: The ConnectionString property has not been initialized.

RealSkydiving — 2009-01-24T00:14:09Z

This occurred in version 09.01.05 of RealDropzone Office.

Large moving message LED displays

RealSkydiving — 2009-01-21T00:36:19Z

One critical feature that the television displays provide is the ability to list flight manifest information, for students and instructors; this is how information is communicated from the office to the tandems, students, and instructors about who is jumping with each instructor, and on which flight. The amount of information required to be displayed here is in excess of what would fit on a moving LED display.

That having been said, from the fun-jumper perspective having each fun jumper displayed publically may not be as important to the dropzone. If someone running RealDropzone™ wanted the ability to just display flight numbers and call times, and to do so through a moving LED Display, this feature could be added without much trouble. If a RealDropzone™ subscriber wanted to add this feature it would be fairly easy to do so, and I would add it at no additional cost however I would require them to loan me their device so that I wouldn’t end up with another unused electrical device on my shelves.

I think that the PA system is an important aspect of a dropzone and I would not want to see a display device such as this replace PA announcements of flight and call information. I had considered adding the capability for prerecorded mp3s to be played at different call times automatically, but felt that it would not be a feature that dropzones would use because having a machine make your announcements takes away from the ‘personal’ feel that most dropzones want to provide.

I do believe that having the ability to see visually what the calls are is a great complement to the PA announcements because jumpers who missed the PA announcement or who have just arrived can quickly check to see where the planes are without having to ask staff in the manifest window.

As always, thanks very much for your suggestions and feedback.

Blue Skies,

Matt Christenson

P.S.

Here is a link to the referenced dropzone.com discussion.

Great Development Team!

diverds — 2009-01-19T03:45:42Z

Hi all,

I am not a dropzone owner and have no use for a product like Real Dropzone but I wanted to share with you my experience with Matt and the Real Dropzone team.

I produce an online radio show for jumpers called Skydive Radio. When the show started we built a basic web site that met our needs but had a very "do it yourself" feel to it. As the show grew over 3 years we often talked about upgrading to a more professional web site. About 2 months ago we decided to take the plunge. After looking at Matt's work at www.skydivechicago.com I approached him about developing a new site for Skydive Radio. The new site launched last week and I am really excited about it. Check it out at www.skydiveradio.com.

Not only did Matt and his team give us a very clean professional look, but they actually developed brand new software specifically for our online radio needs and integrated it seamlessly into our new site. The support we received through the development process was awesome. The Real Dropzone team did all the work and then gave us a chance to review it. Any tweaks or changes we asked for were implemented within hours or less. I am new to this type of site and have had many questions about how to administer it. Matt is always a phone call or email away and has patiently walked me through the entire learning process.

If you are in the market for a website developer I can not say enough good things about my experience. I am sure Real Dropzone is equally impressive to those working in manifest or running a dropzone. Thanks so much to Matt and the Real Dropzone team for the awesome job. Keep up the great work!

Dave Schwartz

Skydive Radio

Who am I and what is my background in the Skydiving world?

RealSkydiving — 2009-01-18T22:51:08Z

Since I have started to spread the word about RealDropzone™ I have had a number of email inquiries about who I am and what my background is in the Skydiving world, as well as how RealSkydiving came to be...

I have answered this question in the following article:

The History of RealSkydiving

Blue Skies,

Matt Christenson

NSL judging abilites

RealSkydiving — 2009-01-17T23:28:04Z

Excellent suggestion!

I have looked into this a bit in the past, and it’s something that I would like to be able to provide, as the OmniScore product being used for Nationals at this point is outdated, for sure. That being said, it’s a system that works and so it’s hard to convince someone to front the resources that would need to go into building a new product. The fee paid for a single Omni Score judged event isn’t enough to cover the development of a new product, but the use of such a product could pay for its development time over a number of years.

After I’m able to get enough dropzones using RealDropzone, I could look at re-investing some of the license dollars coming in to be able to create a module that allows for real-time video judging, and sharing the results on a webpage – but that will likely be at least a few years out to fit into our budgeting.

If we created a solution that used wireless laptops as the judging interface, it would eliminate the need for custom hardware, which would mean that ANY dropzone could use the product ANY time for ANY event they would like to host – from NSL events to just local competitions… and at no extra cost.

If this is something that a lot of dropzones would be interested in then it could be officially put on the road map for future capabilities, but it will be the RealDropzone subscribers that would need to indicate that this is one of the new capabilities they would like their license fees to support. After we get a decent users group (over 10 subscribing dropzones) we’ll start to have open discussions on these forums about what new capabilities are most important to everyone.

In the meantime if someone wanted the solution as a stand-alone product and was willing to front the initial development, it could be created as a separate product. One of the first things that we would need to do in either case is to establish exactly what the requirements of the product are going to be – so that we can have a better idea of what it would actually cost to develop.

It would be great to get some more specific details about what such a product would need to be able to provide to be used at competitions of all sizes. Perhaps if you are very familiar with the process you can help to define those requirements are.

To get you started – what is the workflow of how a competition would be judged. How much of the workflow dictated by using OmniScore needs to be maintained and how could it be changed to be improved?

There are a number of different steps:

Event Definitions
Team Definitions
Competitor Definitions
Video submissions.
The judging process (user input)
Result communication (displaying judging results real time, and recording electronically for online sharing)

What have I missed, and how can these steps be more fully defined? Also, what are the peiced of data that need to be collected and organized, and how do they relate to each other? For example:

What do we need to know about an event?
What do we neeed to know about a team?
What do we need to know about an individual in a team?
What do we need to know about a judge?
What do we need to know about a video?
What information do we need to collect from a judge about a particular video?

Perhaps we can get some others to jump into this conversation and get some idea going about how the product could be architected...

Blue Skies,

Matt Christenson

Many additions to website content.

RealSkydiving — 2009-01-17T19:50:43Z

If you take a look around the site, you can see that we've been quite building the site up as a resource for both Existing RealDropzone users to use for product support and help, but also for prospective customers to learn about the product.

Here are some of the articles that have been published:

Public release date announced

Introducing RealSkydiving

Introducing RealDropzone

Preliminary Dropzone Questionnaire

RealDropzone Pricing & Licensing

Additionally, we've posted over 50 Training videos! With many more to come!

Check back soon for more documentation and videos, as well as the addition of a Screen Shots section for those who want to do some quick research without watching the videos.

Blue Skies,

RealSkydiving