Pre-history of Director

So where did this system come from?

The principal designer of Director AMS has been working in the online registration space for over 20 years. Starting back in the late 90s with some of first ever online registration systems used by Ironman Australia and the Sydney Marathon.

Oh how things have changed since then!

Pre-History

A pre-cursor of this system was released in New Zealand in 2000 under the name “Event Director”. Over a number of years, Event Director became the industry leader in Australia and New Zealand, with an almost exclusive lock on all of the biggest events on the continent. The business was under-pinned by the big five Australian events; Sydney City to Surf (still the world’s biggest run), Gold Coast Marathon, Perth City to Surf, Sydney Running Festival and Run 4 the Kids in Melbourne. In New Zealand, the system was used by the Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch Marathons and Wellington Round the Bays.

In 2011, Event Director was sold to Active Networks. The system continued to operate for another 3 years with Active at the helm, although many of the top clients drifted on to other platforms. During this time, the software architect for Event Director moved in to the event production arena and founded Running Events, a company focussed sharply on running only events in and around Auckland, New Zealand.

Version 1

When Active Network announced end-of-life for Event Director, the team at Running Events realised they needed a platform for a growing event business which was now pulling in some serious numbers. The options were to move to the Active Network platform or build something completely new. We chose the second option!

In 2014, tiktok Director was released as an extension of the Timing Sports timing database. It included all of the standard registration functionality as well as a seperate, standalone, result database.

Version 2

Early in 2018, it was decided to re-devlop tiktok Director using newer, more modern web technologies and a completely redesigned database. The new database design provided for a fully integrated entrant database which could be used to manage entrant data from registration all the way through race timing to results. As well as a new database, the front end of the system was redeveloped using the google-owned Angular browser-based programming language. Unfortunately, this part of the project was not as successfu and, after many months of issues with the new front end, Angular was abandoned.

Version 3 (Current)

Development work on the current version of Director began in mid-2019 using the Microsoft technologies of .net Core and Razor Pages. The impact was instant and incredibly successful and over the remainder of 2019, the entire application was quickly built-out to be the industry-leading, robust and super-functional product we see now.