Category: Development

What’s new in MIDAS v4.25

2 minute read time · Updated January 6, 2023 · First published May 31, 2020

The world has been seemingly grinding to a halt over the past couple of months due to COVID-19.

As a small and agile UK business, we’ve been fortunate in that our day to day operations haven’t been adversely affected. We’re still promptly responding to pre-sales questions and providing support to customers to the same high standards as before.

But we’re aware that many of our customer’s operations have had to temporarily be put on hold. If your business is one of those affected, remember we’re here to help. Please see our blog post from March for ways we can support your business in these challenging times.

During these past few months however, development of MIDAS hasn’t stopped! In fact, it’s provided us with a unique opportunity to devote additional time to development of our software.

As you may know, MIDAS has been in active development for some 15 years now. Throughout this time, we’ve been regularly releasing significant updates at least three times a year. Each significant updates always includes new and improved features.

Following the release of MIDAS v4.24 back in March, we’ve been hard at work on v4.25 during the UK lockdown.

We’ve added dozens of new features and improvements for this next release, which we’re really excited about!

There’s so much to share, which is why over the coming posts here on our blog, we’ll be taking a closer look at what you can expect in v4.25. Here’s what we’ve announced so far:

Reddit You can also ask questions and discuss the new features of v4.25 over on Reddit.

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New Reviews Addon

3 minute read time · Updated March 18, 2024 · First published March 5, 2020

With the latest update (v4.24) to our MIDAS web based room booking and resource scheduling software fast approaching, we’ve been introducing some of the highlights of the new update over the past few blog posts.

In our previous post, we revealed a new editable “Booking Feedback” template and options to allow your MIDAS system to automatically send clients a post-booking follow-up email. This could be used, for example, to thank them for their recent visit and to encourage them to use your facilities again soon.

To further enhance and extend this new feature, we’re also introducing a new optional “Reviews” addon, which works in conjunction with this feature. This addon allows you to automatically collect feedback, ratings, and reviews of your facilities/business on leading independent review sites, such as Trustpilot.

Initially, the new optional “Reviews” addon supports four leading independent review platforms;

Collect Reviews
https://collect-reviews.com
Reviews.io
https://reviews.io
Trustpilot
https://trustpilot.com
TrustSpot
https://trustspot.io

How It Works

The “Reviews” addon works by automatically notifying an independent review collection platform after a client’s booking has taken place at your facilities. The review platform then in turn sends out a review invitation by email to your client asking them to leave a review or rating of your business on their website.

Here’s how the process works:

  1. A client’s booking in MIDAS takes place.
  2. Shortly thereafter, MIDAS automatically sends the client a post-booking email (the content of which is customizable via a template)
  3. When this email is sent, it is also transparently BCC’d (Blind Carbon Copied) to your chosen review collection platform
  4. The review platform in turn sends your client an invitation to rate/review your business on their independent review platform

What you’ll need

In order to be able to take advantage of the functionality the optional “Reviews” addon offers, you’ll need the following:

  • MIDAS v4.24 (or later)
  • A valid account with a supported review platform (see above for a list of currently supported review platforms)
  • Your MIDAS system correctly configured to send email
  • Scheduled Tasks correctly configured to run in MIDAS, and the new Post-Booking email notification option enabled.

Complete documentation for the new Reviews addon is available online.

Once MIDAS v4.24 is released, new customers will be able to purchase the “Reviews” addon through our secure site.

Existing customers with valid subscriptions running MIDAS v4.24 may add the optional “Reviews” addon to their system by upgrading.

Are there any other review platforms you’d like to see included in this addon in the future? Let us know!

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New Booking Feedback Email & Template

3 minute read time · Updated March 12, 2024 · First published March 3, 2020

Over the past few articles, we’ve unvailed some of the new features in the next update (v4.24) to our MIDAS room and resource scheduling software.

In this article we’re revealing a new email notification. This notification can be configured to automatically send to your clients shortly after their bookings have concluded.

Those familiar with the extensive email notification capabilities of MIDAS will know that you can already configure MIDAS to automatically send clients a variety of notifications. These include; booking confirmations, reminders of their upcoming bookings, invoice payment reminders and more. In fact there are no fewer than 10 different email notification types available in MIDAS. Each of these may be individually customizable through the use of templates.

Send a post-booking email to your clients

For v4.24 we’re adding in an additional email notification template to the list – for “Booking Feedback”. The idea behind this is as follows. A short time after a client’s booking has taken place, MIDAS can automatically send them a courtesy follow-up email. This could simply thank them for their visit. It could also invite them to leave feedback on their room hire experience at your organization.

New Booking Feedback email template in MIDAS
New “Booking Feedback” email template in MIDAS v4.24

As with all other editable templates in MIDAS, the new “Booking Feedback” template may be modified and customized to your particular requirements. Templates are accessed and modified via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Templates. Your templates may be customized to include simple HTML code and placeholder variables.

As a side note, eagle-eyed viewers may also note from the above screenshot that we’ve also now made the Template Preview and Template Code areas vertically resizable! Previously these were both a fixed height.

Once you’ve customized your “Booking Feedback” email template, you can then enable it. You can set how long after a client’s booking has concluded MIDAS should wait before sending the email. These settings may be configured via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Scheduled Tasks.

Enable a Scheduled Task to automatically send an email to a client after their visit
Enable a Scheduled Task to automatically email a client after their visit

For these post-booking emails to be automatically sent, you’ll need to have Scheduled Tasks configured on your server. If Scheduled Tasks are correctly configured, the “Last Run” time indicated in the above screenshot should show a time within the last 60 minutes. All our cloud-hosted customer’s MIDAS systems are pre-configured to run scheduled tasks. For self-hosted customers, if you’ve not yet configured Scheduled Tasks on your server, please refer to our KB article: How to configure your server to run Scheduled Tasks.

We hope our customers will appreciate this new notification and template addition to the forthcoming v4.24 update. In our next article, we’ll look at how the functionality of this new feature can be further enhanced with a brand-new optional addon. So stay tuned to our blog to discover more in the coming days!

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New Bypass Venue Blocks Permission

3 minute read time · Updated January 15, 2024 · First published February 27, 2020

As the wet and windy wintry weather shows no sign of letting up here in the UK, we continue to put the finishing touches to the next update to our MIDAS web based room booking and resource scheduling software, v4.24.

In our previous article, we announced support in v4.24 for a new multi-select custom list field. In this blog post, we’re revealing a new user permission we’re adding to our forthcoming update.

“User Permissions” in MIDAS allow administrators to precisely control what each user account within the system can access. From very restrictive “view only” permissions to fully-fledged administrator – and everything in between! In fact, there are in excess of 30 individual permissions you can set on a per-account basis. A full list of these permissions may be found here.

For v4.24 we’re adding a new additional user permission: “Can Bypass Venue Blocks”. To understand the purpose of this new permissions, we first need to understand what “Venue Blocks” actually are..

What are venue “blocks”?

Back in 2014, we introduced “Venue Blocks” to MIDAS. You can read more about this cool feature in this blog post. Essentially, venue “blocking” allows administrators to set up rules so that when a certain venue is booked, another venue is then automatically blocked from having any bookings during the same time period.

An example of where this may be useful is in a Church environment where you have a quiet prayer room adjacent to a sports hall. It may be desirable to prevent noisy bookings taking place in the sports hall when there’s a prayer meeting happening in the room next door. This is where Venue Blocking comes in.

Another example might be a large room which can either be hired as a whole space, or sub-divided and hired as two separate, smaller rooms. Obviously, if one of the sub-divisions is booked, another booking couldn’t take place in the space as a whole at the same time. Again, this is where Venue Blocking in MIDAS becomes really useful, as you can easily prevent such occurrences.

Bypassing Venue Blocks

Until now, however, there has been no way to “override” venue blocks, short of removing the blocks from venues themselves. That’s why we’re introducing the new “Can Bypass Venue Blocks” permission for v4.24:

Bypass MIDAS Venue Blocking Rules
New “Bypass Venue Blocks” permission in v4.24

This permission isn’t granted to any user by default. However, any user account subsequently granted the “Can Bypass Venue Blocks” permission, can then make bookings regardless of any venue blocking rules in effect.

We’re sure this additional user permission will be of considerable use in helping you manage your bookable spaces more effectively. And once again, this improvement is being implemented as a direct result of feedback from our users. We love hearing feedback and suggestions for improvement and new features from our customers. Why not vote on some suggestions and let us know what you’d like to see in MIDAS in the future!

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