20th Anniversary Edition Update 2: Pricing

What inLeague Costs

    In our previous post, we outlined some of the big changes coming to the inLeague platform for 2022. In this post, we'll dive a bit deeper into how and why we're changing our pricing model.

    Four Changes For a Sustainable Future

    The pricing model for the inLeague 20th Anniversary Edition is live on our pricing page. Now that you've seen the what we wanted to say a bit about the why, even if little of it should come as a surprise to anybody who has been involved in youth sports or Software as a Service for the last two decades.

 

    inLeague began with a simple "per-player, per-season" fee that was collected after registration was closed for the season. The biggest driver of this decision was our unwillingness to marry our software to any of the available merchant services processors on any of the three occasions we surveyed the landscape for credit card processing companies in 2003, 2012, or 2017. Companies like Authorize.net or Firstdata were, fundamentally, finance companies that didn't have a lot of understanding of or interest in small, agile technology companies like inLeague or in the business cycle of a typical youth sports league. In addition, our customers didn't like dealing with them; even trying to answer how much a league was paying in credit card fees required a hours of effort and a graduate degree in exciting subjects like 'interchange fees.' 

     Our partnership with Stripe in 2020 elevated merchant services processing from the status of 'necessary but unpleasant, like going to the dentist' to 'exciting, even fun possibilities' -- Stripe is a technology company that happens to work in finance and they "just get us" in a way none of our previous partners have. Stripe makes it trivial for us to collect our fees at the time the transaction is processed, in line with how the rest of the industry collects their fees. 

    Change #1: For most leagues, all of our fees will be collected directly from credit card transactions, beginning with registration for the Fall 2022 season. No more invoices.

    Over time, our pricing model evolved as best it could to keep pace with the demands on our business. We added monthly hosting fees to cover the expense of cloud infrastructure based on the size of the league; we added temporary (we hoped) surcharges to cover the expense of integration with AYSO National systems. We offered inLeague Pro, a subscription on our mobile app that offered additional, team-level functions to subsidize the cost of maintaining a mobile app platform. We altered our per-player model a bit to accommodate additional, supplemental programs with registration fees considerably higher than the typical AYSO core recreational fee.

    Many of these fees vary from league to league, and the result is a lot of similar-but-not-the-same numbers that we've wanted to streamline for some time. 

    Change #2: With few exceptions, all of the different categories of fees are going away; no more annual hosting fees; no more AYSO integration fees; no more inLeague Pro. They're gone.

    To come up a simple substitute, we dove into the math on how inLeague is used. Our revenue historically comes almost entirely from player registration, but that's just one of several fee-collection mechanisms inLeague supports:

• Seasonal player registration
• Invoice templates
• Team transactions
• Event signups
• Donations

    Only one of these things brought in revenue, and it's revenue that inLeague didn't realize until 4-8 months after the registration occurred. The result is that registration 'paid for itself' while every other fee-collecting feature we offered cost more in support and development than it brought in. Making our fee structure homogenous and consistent is important to the sustainability and scalability of our business.

    Some leagues have add-on services whose pricing is not changing. These will continue to be invoiced annually, as they are not part of our software:

• Public Web Site / CMS Hosting
• Domain & DNS Management
• Custom Services unrelated to inLeague (e.g. Google Workspaces)

    Change #3: inLeague transaction fees will apply to player registration, invoice templates, event signups, and (to a lesser extent) team transactions. They will not apply to donations.

    Finally, we're not immune to inflation.

     At inLeague, we don't outsource any of our development or support. Our team is headquartered in Austin, Texas, which was an affordable alternative to Silicon Valley when we moved here from New York City in 2012; today, it may as well be Silicon Valley. This is not without its benefits: we've been impressed with the rising quality of the talent pool and we're confident that Austin is the right place for inLeague. 

    In making the determination on where to set our prices, we tried to synthesize a result from several inputs:

• Our costs, many of which have been impacted by the pandemic and its related impact on the cost of living
• Inflation: Since 2017...
• Amazon Prime has gone up 40%
• Netflix has gone up 50%
• Other vendors in our space:
•  Sterling Volunteers charges AYSO $25 per volunteer (against their incurred costs, which range from $10 to $100+ per volunteer, depending on their State!)
• SportsConnect collects a similar, per-transaction fee
• Stripe and other merchant services providers collect fees in the neighborhood of 3% 

    From the point of view of a volunteer youth sports leagues, there's no question that these fees add up. It has always been our preference to promote more soccer and charge less "per unit of soccer." That was easier in 2010, when we weren't obliged to support live feeds to a National Association platform, a third party background check platform, and two mobile app ecosystems. The minimum viable product to manage a sports league is not as minimum as it used to be, and those requirements have to be priced into our products and your registration fees.

    Change #4: The cost of subscribing to the inLeague platform is keeping pace with the cost of developing the kind of product you want to use and that we want to build.

    Here's what all of this looks like in practice:

Fees Collected by inLeague	Pre-2022	Fall 2022+
Per Player Registration	$4 - $6	None
Per Player (AYSO Integration)	$0.65	None
Per Supplemental Competition	$5 - $10	None
Annual Hosting	$60-$120/mo.	None
inLeague Pro	$1/player/year	None
Per Player Transaction (with some exceptions)	None	$3 + 3%* (or less)

* Exceptions, Refunds, and Bundling Transactions

   

    While our aim was to keep everything as simple as possible, there are some edge cases where our fees either won't apply or will apply differently:

• Donations: inLeague has never collected any fees for donations, and we never will.
• Team Transactions: Team (aka 'tournament') transactions submitted on behalf of a player already assigned to a team will incur a reduced fee of $1.50 + 3%.
• Waitlisted players who never play: inLeague follows AYSO National's refund policy. If a player is waitlisted and dropped without ever coming off of the waitlist, neither the National Player Fee nor the inLeague platform fee will apply. The platform fee will be automatically refunded for players who have never been taken off the waitlist.
• Players who drop but re-register. The platform fee for player registration will only be collected once per program for which a player registers. If a player registers for the wrong program, is dropped, and then re-registers for a different program, only the difference between the two fees will not apply for the second registration (or zero, if the second program is less expensive than the first). We are also working to minimize the number of "wrong program" registrations by allowing parents to "transfer" their registration from one program to another when their players are eligible for both and the only difference is either a refund or an additional fee. 
• Refunds: We are considering whether or how to expand cases where the platform fees can be refunded. Our models here are AYSO (who rarely issue refunds on the player fee) and Stripe (which only refunds their fees when the refund is issued before the charge 'settles', at some point typically within 12 hours of when the charge is made). We appreciate that there are some edge cases where people accidentally sign up for things; we intend to do everything we can to develop our user experience to minimize these cases, but we welcome your feedback and will be reviewing our pricing model in 2023 once everyone has had some experience with it.
• Bundling:  In the event manager, we support bundling multiple event signups in a single transaction just as the legacy platform does. We will be adding the capability to sign up for events as a part of player registration in time for 2023 registration.

    We do not currently support 'shopping cart' registrations where multiple players may be registered for a program in a single transaction, but this is a possibility for future development. 

Timing: When Does This Happen? 

    The new fee schedule will go into effect for Fall 2022 Registration, which we anticipate going live in mid to late April. Spring 2022 registrations are unaffected and will be the last invoices billed under the previous model. For fee collections independent of registration like the event manager, invoice templates, and team transactions, the new fee schedule will go live in early April.

20th Anniversary Edition Update 1: Features

What inLeague Does

    

       We began work on the 20th Anniversary Edition of inLeague in the Spring of 2020 with several goals in mind:

• Mobile & Browser Unification: We wanted a single, mobile-focused but desktop-capable experience such that any feature available in one could be made available in the other without additional development.
• Modern Development Tools: We wanted to leverage advances in modern, front-end languages and tooling that would enable inLeague to support the kinds of features and user experience everyone expects in 2022 while retaining all of the "under the hood" business and database rules that are the engine of our application,
• Doing What We Do Best: We wanted to re-imagine player and volunteer registration to take advantage of everything we've learned about league management since we began building software for youth soccer in 2002,
• AYSO National / Stack Sports Integration: We invested hundreds of hours of development work with the teams at Stack Sports and eTrainU to integrate our system with the new association management platform in use by the AYSO National office.

20th Anniversary Edition: Registration Configuration

    Some of the features of our 20th Anniversary Edition:

• Brand New Player & Volunteer Registration: From-scratch player registration system engineered to support multiple, overlapping soccer programs with eligibility based on individual invitations, player name & DOB (for new players who do not yet exist in the system) or customized eligibility rules
• New User / Family Experience: Streamlined the New User Experience with better validation and hand-holding for critical volunteer fields like name and DOB
• Calendar-based Background Checks: No more Membership Year background checks; all background checks initiated for Fall 2022 registration or later are good for 15 months.
• Instant Sign-On to eTrainU: No more syncing credentials with AYSOU; volunteers logged into inLeague can access eTrainU directly from the inLeague portal.
• Better Support for Area, Section, and National Staff: Full visibility for Area, Section, and National staff into all inLeague player and volunteer records from MY2021 on 
• Improved Certification Sync: Instant updates to volunteer certifications from the Affinity Association Management platform
• Safesport & CA Mandated Fingerprinting: These have been added to our certificate store and are now supported by our reporting engine.
• Re-written Payment Engine: Registration and Event payments will now use Stripe Invoices, with support for multiple line items per invoice rolled out over time

Last But Not Least: 3rd Party API Integration

    The foundation for all of the development over the last two years is our commitment to developing open, accessible, industry-standard solutions. In other words: when we write code to pull a roster, or add a player to a family, or invite a player to pay an invoice, it's exposed via our API and can be used by any of our leagues for their own applications without even downloading or logging into inLeague.

    Our API is documented according to the OpenAPI specification and is updated regularly. Our leagues are already using it for reporting and registration flow. 

The Road Ahead

Beta: Late March 2022

   

    We will be reaching out to our league administrators and registrars in the second half of March to organize access to our demo instance for a preview of registration and configuration preparation for Fall 2022.

Development Roadmap

   

    The Spring 2022 release of the 20th Anniversary Edition (for Fall 2022 registration) is only the beginning: we'll be releasing updates to our new platform every month or two until we've migrated every function from the legacy version. 

    We'll be working on team assignments, team rosters, and event signups and payments for our first major update in advance of the Fall season. We'll also be updating our documentation and conducting training for all of our leagues.

    Thank you for your continued support as we look forward to the biggest milestone in the history of our software!

Infrastructure and Technology Changes; Cloud Applications In 2018 and Beyond

Now that the dust has settled and inLeague is able to serve all of our customers at AYSO, we wanted to focus on what decisions we could make to keep our technology both sturdy where it needs to be (inLeague has 99.99% uptime since 2010) while retaining flexibility to adapt to new best developments and best practices in the cloud software world.

To that end, we are undertaking several major shifts in the second half of 2018:

• Server hosting: Codero "Bare Metal" servers to DigitalOcean "droplets"
• Server Operating System: Windows 2012 Server to Ubuntu Linux 18.04
• Application Engine: Adobe Coldfusion to Lucee 

Welcome to inLeague.io

1) Changing our server infrastructure and provider. Since inLeague first "went pro" in 2005 with the addition of its second and third regions in New York, all of our services have been hosted at the company now known as Codero, headquartered across town from us in Austin, TX. We've been very satisfied with Codero, but the industry is moving away from the types of "bare metal" deployments (where we lease physical servers in their data centers) in which Codero specialized. An analogy often used when us geeks get together to talk about this sort of thing is "pets versus cattle":

Historically, our servers have been pets: they have names and regular checkups, and if something happens to them, we drop everything and rush to make them better. They don't (usually) leave us hairballs in the middle of the night, but they also aren't especially appreciative of the trouble we go to on their behalf. More importantly, growth is constrained because it often involves adopting an entirely new pet.

For the last few years, we've seen a sea change toward cattle -- functional but more (if not entirely) anonymous units that are interchangeable; when one gets sick, you still figure out what went wrong, but you get another to take its place right away to minimize downtime and ease maintenance and upgrades.

This being Texas, cattle are of course not interchangeable, and we're imagining that all of our cattle will be longhorns.

If the "cattle" in this analogy are the hardware we use for running our databases and application servers, the software equivalent -- writing our code in such a way that it makes no difference where it's running -- is called containerization, named for the shipping containers that represent a way of packaging software so that it is just as easy to deploy ten of something as it is to deploy one. We have been gradually adapting our software to this model over the last two years, and hope to complete the process by the end of 2018.

As software companies use fewer pets and more cattle, companies like our current host are partnering with larger, "infrastructure-as-a-service" providers like Amazon or Google to re-sell their services. Rather than purchase re-sold infrastructure, we're going right to the source with DigitalOcean and relocating our (now much more bovine) servers to their data centers in New York City. If you've been following inLeague for a long time, you know that we believe in the freedom to choose the best tool for the job; and while we use and depend on many Google and Amazon services in our applications, we didn't want to be locked into their ecosystems, and found DigitalOcean to be a very reputable, popular, and (best of all) affordable solution. To distinguish our updated products, we've secured a new domain name: inleague.io -- this will ultimately succeed most inleague.org sites, but both will co-exist for many years to come.

We'll be sorry to leave Codero behind, and we recommend anybody interested in an Amazon-centric reseller consider them as they've been a wonderful partner for us for a long time.

Current Status: In testing. We are building out our development and deployment pipelines on DigitalOcean. Our new Content Management System will host our first production sites on our new domain, inleague.io, and we will focus on our flagship applications in the Fall after the start of the Soccer season (for inLeague) and the school year (for inRoll).

Windows to Linux: You Can Invite Us to the Cool Parties, Now

2) As of the Summer of 2018, containerized deployments in production are almost always done on Linux. We expect this to change, as Windows Server 2016 updated and Server 2019 both emphasize container support, but for container-based applications today, Linux cattle are the best cattle. Since most of inLeague's technology stack is Java-based, and Java runs on any operating system, this has more of an impact on inLeague's DevOps (Development and Operations) practices than our software. We've been "Windows People" on the server side for fifteen years, but before that, we started out on Linux, so we're coming full circle and restoring our geek street cred with Ubuntu Linux. This change was made possible, ironically enough, by Microsoft's embrace of Linux for their database platform that inLeague has used from the beginning -- SQL Server. Without Microsoft's willingness to let their customers choose the best tools for the job, we wouldn't have been able to abandon Windows Server -- so we part on good terms, and we expect to look at Windows again in the future as we don't expect them to cede the battle for containerization to Linux.

A nice perk with this change in strategy is that we are able to take the budget we were spending on Windows Server licensing and invest it into hardware. This lets us streamline our operations to make every dollar our clients give us to support their business or their league as efficient as possible.

Sayonara, Adobe Coldfusion

3) Changing our application development engine from Adobe's proprietary Coldfusion Markup Language (CFML) to Lucee, the open-source CFML alternative.

While the inLeague code base receives hundreds of updates every year, there is still some first-generation code from the original inLeague application in 2003. This makes our investment in Coldfusion long-lived, but that's not a reason to keep doing something; we can re-write code, but we've always been very careful to avoid technology fads that attract a lot of attention and then fizzle out after a couple of years. For some time now, Coldfusion hasn't been a popular choice for new applications, and a few years back we considered dropping it. Adobe's handling of the product seemed focused on providing support to government and enterprise clients rather than in developing the language or the technology. Fortunately for the CFML world, two things happened around the same time that rescued the language and the development community from the abyss of irrelevance: Lucee became a mature and mainstream product, and Ortus Solutions (makers of the estimable Coldbox, Commandbox, and Forgebox products, among others) took a leading role in the CF community with investments in their own open source platforms, conferences, and generally solving the kinds of problems that the community needed solving -- especially since Adobe didn't seem especially interested in doing so themselves.

The first post on this blog announced our original intention to do this back in 2015, and for some of our software, we got about 95% of the way there. For most everything we do, Lucee was faster and better. Unfortunately, for the other 5%, Lucee just didn't work -- not because it wasn't a good product, but because it's like a different dialect in any language: sometimes you have to say things differently to be understood, and re-writing that 5% would've been a huge investment in what was then still a fairly young product. So we "re-upped" our Adobe licenses for another few years.

Adobe is behind the curve with containerization and the future of the Coldfusion markup language is Lucee and Ortus. We've suspected this for some time, but now we're publicly betting the farm on it.

That's it for the Summer 2018 update -- we'll be back before the start of the season with some details on new features for inLeague and inLeague mobile!

Birth Certificate Processors

While we are waiting on AYSO National for our larger, Summer update, we've released a small utility to assist with birth certificate processing as well an access level to go with it.

Birth Certificate admin will have access (along with registrars and webmasters) to the birth certificate tool now available from the 'Players' menu. This tool will show all players on file who meet the following criteria:

- The 'birth certificate' field on their player/child record is 0
- They have an active registration within the last two years from today's date

Birth certificate admin can select one or more of these players to process, and the system will set this field to 1 and log the change -- the person who processed it, the date, and the time.

Note that birth certificate admin cannot access the player editor and they cannot "reverse" this process (i.e. they cannot set someone who already has a birth certificate recorded back to 0).

There is an option for an email confirmation that sends a short email to parent 1 and parent 2 (if present) indicating the receipt of the birth certificate. The context of that email may be edited by a webmaster from 'edit page content' on the birth certificate tool.

Note that the new access level (birth certificate administrator) will be query-able from the report center within the next day or so, but it is not currently in the Authorizations Center. The auth center is getting a re-write later this year and will be updated at that time along with some new functionality.

Pricing (2017 on) and inLeague Pro

Since inLeague first became inLeague in 2006, we have tried to keep our pricing as transparent as possible; and we have always operated on a per-player, per-season, per-module pricing model, most recently seen here:

inLeague Standard Rate Schedule circa June 2016. Prices last updated in 2009.

We chose this model for a variety of reasons:

• inLeague has always been a premium service targeted at leagues with greater than 500 players. Even so, it was important to us to provide entry points for leagues that were primarily interested in on-line registration solutions such that they wouldn't be paying an additional premium for scheduling services they didn't necessarily need.
• The average price paid to register for youth sports in an inLeague program was around $100, but most leagues collected money for a variety of other activities (additional soccer programs, fundraising, off-season events); we felt that 5-7% of the registration fee was a good place for a service that kept the league running smoothly, but we didn't want to be taking percentages from "non-sports" events, even if they used inLeague to collect funds. We also didn't wanted our leagues to be the only recipient of their constituents' transactions, rather than having inLeague collect money on their behalf and then dispense to the league it every month.
• We want to support league growth rather than penalizing it with higher fees.

In the ten years we've relied on this model, we've learned several things:

• Just about every league uses all four "modules" (registration, team building, game scheduling, and referee scheduling); occasionally, a league would sign up for just one or two, but after a year would end up using all four.
• Usage of inLeague has changed over the years with the rise of mobile devices and mobile apps. When we started out, our target audience was exclusively a league administrator or scheduler; parents would sign in once or twice a year to register their players and indicate volunteer roles. While we are still primarily a league-oriented product, much more of our development in 2016 is focused on "team-level" interactions between coaches and parents. A pricing model developed for a "desktop" web application doesn't allow for a lot of flexibility when our focus needs to be on products and platforms that didn't exist (for us, anyway) ten years ago.
• The cost of participation has gone up. In the table below, "Registration Fee" refers to the initial payment made at the time of registration to participate in a soccer program. In many cases, particularly in the last few years with the expansion of "EXTRA" and other forms of competitive play, players submit additional payments over the course of the season. Avg. Participation Cost refers to the median amount paid over the course of a season, and Max Participation Cost refers to the most expensive individual program cost administered by a league. Of course, our leagues are not a representative sample of anything other than leagues that prefer to use inLeague.

Year	Avg. Registration Fee	Avg. Participation Cost	Max Participation Cost	Consumer Price Index (annual average)
2007	$89	$117	$1,200	207.3
2008	$96	$118	$1,200	215.3
2009	$97	$104	$1,000	214.54
2010	$100	$109	$1,175	218.06
2011	$110	$123	$1,550	224.94
2012	$112	$132	$1,700	229.59
2013	$118	$148	$1,820	232.96
2014	$131	$151	$1,700	236.74
2015	$141	$161	$2,650	237.02
2016	$151	$158	$2,600	238.78 (as of 6/16)

Takeaways from the above:

1. Leagues either use inLeague or not; we're better off with discounted trials than with a pricing matrix when everyone prefers to use everything.
2. The average, up-front participation cost has risen 51% since 2010; inLeague's prices were last set in 2009. 
3. The Consumer Price Index shows inflation at 9.5-10.5% since 2010.
4. Mobile development is a priority that the original model did not account for.

It is also the case that, as the cost of participation has gone up, so have the number (and dollar amount) of scholarships awarded by individual leagues.

Simplified Pricing for 2017 (subject to review)

We are retaining the league size scale model, but flattening the per-module portion. The updated model has the following goals:

1. Long-term stability -- we do not want to revisit our base pricing model for the foreseeable future.
2. Minimal changes for smaller leagues
3. Our prices should inflate based on our own costs incurred and the Consumer Price Index. Our largest costs are software development (labor) followed at a distant second by hardware (server expenses), both of which have increased somewhat, but not tremendously, since 2010.

These changes will not impact the current (Fall 2016) season; they will impact any season that commences after 1/1/17.

inLeague Management Suite Subscription Pricing (per season), effective January 1, 2017

• @500 Players: $6.75/player
• @1000 Players: $5.40/player
• @1500 Players: $5.15/player
• @2000 Players: $4.70/player
• @3500+ Players: $4.00/player

Enter inLeague Pro

We knew that we did not want to "fence off" functionality to which our leagues are accustomed behind an additional subscription fee. Because mobile development involves technology and skill sets on top of what we use to maintain our web applications, we focused on mobile development as the vehicle for adding additional value to our services. 

Before we could ask for a subscription fee, we had to learn how to build mobile applications and how to integrate them with our products. inLeague Mobile was first released in late 2014, and now supports several features:

• Game schedules for players in the logged-in user's family
• Game schedules for referees and coaches in the logged-in user's family (or league-wide)
• Team Conversations - instant messages between coaches, team staff, and team parents
• Center Refs and division heads may input game scores

inLeague Pro will be an optional subscription level for leagues beginning in 2017. The following details are subject to change, but the current plan is:

• Game schedules and score input will continue to be freely accessible
• Team Conversations and a new feature coming in the Fall of 2016 will become "Pro" features
• inLeague Pro will cost $1 per player per year (not per season) regardless of league size
• All leagues have been given automatic access to inLeague Pro through December 31st, 2016.

Going forward, only those services we consider both "premium" and "optional" will be part of inLeague Pro; the majority of our development will continue to be invested in the primary inLeague application and publicly-available inLeague Mobile.

Summer 2016: Welcome to the inLeague Development Blog!

Welcome to the inLeague Development Blog!

In the past, inLeague staff have sent seasonal emails to league administrators that summarize our development progress and our plans for the future. We will keep doing that, but the details will be posted and archived here, as well as linked from inleague.org and the inLeague application.

Summer 2016: eSignature, Concurrent Registration, and Lucee

We have three major initiatives underway for our Summer 2016 update: Player eSignature updates, concurrent multi-season registration, and a change in the back-end server software that runs the inLeague application suite.

eSignature 2.0 (Coming Soon) and Volunteer Registration Integration (Coming Next)

More eSignatures, please!

In 2014, inLeague worked with AYSO National Staff to integrate player registration with eAYSO. Since that time, the mechanism AYSO uses for eSignature has been revised, along with plans to include adult/volunteer registration and adult league player registration.

Previously, inLeague would record the name, internet address, and timestamp for all of the waivers preceding each registration, and then send that data to eAYSO. This system was largely invisible to the end user: it did not interrupt the registration process but occurred behind-the-scenes after registration was completed.

To improve the integrity and accessibility of the eSignature process, registrations will soon be directed just prior to the payment page to an eSignature page hosted by AYSO's eSignature vendor. This process is similar to Docusign: parents will be presented with a printable form and click through to 'sign' the form. The electronically signed form is archived and can be printed by the parent, a league administrator, or AYSO National Staff at any point in the future.

As of early July 2016, this system is in final testing with AYSO and we anticipate that it will be rolled out soon.

If all goes well, inLeague's next step this Fall will be to implement the same eAYSO and eSignature integration for volunteer registration -- no more separate, standalone eAYSO volunteer signup!

What Does eSignature Cost?

There are two elements to the cost of this system:

• Annual and/or per-volume license and archive fees paid to the eSignature vendor
• Development costs to integrate inLeague with eAYSO & and the eSignature vendor

AYSO National pays the former.

Development costs for this system are largely up-front; in theory, once the system is in operation, it should not require significant maintenance. 

inLeague will recover this cost through a per-player eAYSO Integration fee of sixty five cents. This fee was introduced in 2014; the original system was paid for by early 2016. The revision is significantly larger than the original system, but the fee will remain the same, and it will be phased out once the devleopment costs have been recovered and presuming there are only marginal new costs incurred.

Concurrent Player Registration for Multiple Seasons

Many leagues run travel, tournament, or development programs alongside their recreational programs. Registration timelines for these programs do not always line up with one another. Beginning with the forthcoming eSignature 2.0 rollout, inLeague will support concurrent registration for multiple seasons.

Coldfusion: Adobe to Lucee's Open Source Server Platform

Credit: Dilbert (http://dilbert.com/strip/2006-12-08)

inLeague's application software was developed in and deployed on Adobe's Coldfusion Markup Language. Every 2-4 years, we evaluate our server hardware and software so that we can best align our resources with our application development roadmap. There are four main pieces to our pipeline:

• Our web and database servers, hosted for many years now by Codero (based here in Austin) with data centers in Phoenix, Dallas, and elsewhere;
• Our database software (Microsoft SQL Server)
• Our web application server software (Adobe Coldfusion)
• Our software development framework that runs on the server software (currently a home-grown mix of solutions developed over the years by inLeague staff)

 As we prepare new servers for inLeague this fall, we also evaluated an open-source alternative to Adobe's Coldfusion platform called Lucee (formerly Railo).

Adobe's Coldfusion engine has served inLeague well for a long time, but Lucee's optimization, feature set, and community approach  are more in line with inLeague's mission and requirements. At the same time, we are evaluating a change in application development framework for our codebase from the home-grown solution we have been using to Framework One, one of a handful of widely-used Coldfusion development frameworks. Framework One (or fw/1)  updates and standardizes how we write our code and implement new features while eliminating repetitive tasks in collecting and processing data or displaying layouts.

All of these potential changes serve the same end, which is to make the most efficient use of resources that will enable us to continue rapid development and deployment of changes and new features to the inLeague application. They are some of the most significant back-end changes we have ever considered. To facilitate our evaluation and eventual transition to these new technologies, we anticipate establishing beta sites for many of our largest leagues so that league administrators and schedulers will be able to put inLeague to the test for the Fall 2016 season. These beta sites will be connected to our production database so that common tasks can be performed on our new systems while the current generation continues to run as a fallback solution until we 'flip the switch.'

We will be in touch with individual leagues in the coming weeks regarding all of these changes. Until then,  we're looking forward to a great Fall season!

All the best,

Samuel Knowlton

Founder & Chief Leagueologist