During the Summer we’ve been busy working away on the next update to MIDAS, v4.14. This upcoming release contains a whole host of new and improved features. We’re really excited to introduce you to these over the course of the next few weeks here on our blog…
The first new feature we’re unavailing is “Tentative” bookings.
What are Tentative bookings?
Currently, bookings in MIDAS can be thought of in one of two ways; either as “confirmed” bookings, or an unconfirmed “booking requests“.
“Confirmed” bookings are fairly self-explanatory. Unconfirmed “booking requests” are those which first require approval from an administrator in order to become a confirmed “booking”.
With the introduction of the optional ability to also make “Tentative” bookings, you can add bookings which only persist for a certain amount of time before being automatically removed. That is, unless you change them to be “confirmed”.
How are tentative bookings useful?
Let’s say you have a client who wants to book “Room 1” a month from today. They may also need “Room 2” at the same times as well. However, they don’t know for sure yet whether they’ll need the extra room until next week.
In v4.14, you’d be able to a regular “confirmed” booking for the client to “Room 1”. You can also a “tentative” booking (or “hold”) for the client to “Room 2”. This ‘tentative’ hold could be set to auto-expire for example two weeks from today.
Once these bookings have been added, then for the next two weeks, both Room 1 and Room 2 will be booked for the client. If you hear nothing further from your client in relation to Room 2, then after two weeks have elapsed, the “tentative” booking in Room 2 will be automatically removed. This then frees up and releases that slot for other potential bookings. Alternatively, if you do hear back from the client before the tentative booking would expire, and they confirm that they do also want Room 2, you can simply update the “tentative” booking and make it “confirmed”.
Whether a booking is added as a “confirmed” or as a “tentative” booking is determined by its “Booking Type”.
Tentative Booking Types
“Booking Types” allow you to categorize and color-code your bookings, and by default all booking types are “confirmed” bookings.
MIDAS v4.14 allows you to set individual booking types to instead make bookings that are assigned that particular type, “tentative”. For each booking type you make “tentative”, you can also set how long tentative bookings of this type should persist for:
You can specify a duration (in minutes, hours, or days) that tentative bookings of the selected type will persist for. Also, whether this period is measured from the point in time the booking is added, or counting back from the start time of the tentative booking.
For example, if a tentative booking is added to the system at 7am on a given day to take place at 4pm the same day, then;
- A booking type with a tentative persistence of “4 hours after being added”. The booking would be automatically removed from the system if it hasn’t been confirmed by 11am. or;
- A booking type with a tentative persistence of “2 hours before booking is due to commence”. The booking would be automatically removed if it hasn’t been confirmed by 2pm.
You can set different tentative persistence settings for each of your booking types. This provides you with maximum flexibility over your tentative booking types.
When “tentative” bookings are being added, they will be clearly indicated on user’s Booking Availability Screens:
Our password strength indicator has been a feature for administrators creating new user accounts since v4.07. For v4.13, we’ve also made this useful visual indicator available whenever an end-users changes their password. The visual indicator classifies the password as either “Very Weak”, “Weak”, “Fair”, “Good” or “Strong” as you type, with a corresponding color to match (i.e. Red = Very Weak, Orange = Fair, Green = Strong). This classification is based upon a number of factors including the length of the password, the presence of upper and lower case letters as well as numbers and special characters, and whether the password has been banned.
