Whilst many people have been away on holiday relaxing over the past couple of months, we’ve been busy working on the next update to our web based room scheduling software. So we thought we’d take this opportunity to let you know about some of the exciting new and improved features coming soon in v4.04.

Venue-Specific Resources

In v4.04, we’re introducing “venue-specific” resources! In previous versions any resources you added to MIDAS would then be available globally across all of your venues. Now, you can specify your resources (equipment, consumables, and staffing) to be available only to specific venues. For example, say you schedule a mixture of both sports facilities and classrooms, and you have “Football Nets” defined as a resource. In v4.04 you can restrict this resource to only be available to your “Sports Hall” and “All Weather Pitch”, but not available for a classroom!

New Web Request Settings

The “Public Booking Request” (web request) feature of our web based scheduling software allows non-users to check your venue’s availability and make booking requests. “Non-users” are visitors to your website or members of the public who don’t have a login for your MIDAS system. Now, we often receive suggestions from our customers of new features they’d like to see in this particular area. As a result, for v4.04, we’ve implemented three brand new settings….

Auto-Approve Booking Requests

If enabled, this new setting will automatically approve and convert all received booking “requests” into actual confirmed bookings (availability permitting). This setting is ideal if you’d like members of the public to be able to schedule their own appointments without first requiring approval from a MIDAS administrator.

Show Hours of Operation

By default, your venue’s operating hours are not revealed on your Public Booking Request screen. This setting will show a visual representation of each venue’s hours of operation (similar to that shown to logged-in users). NOTE: Regardless of this setting, requesters will still not be able to make booking requests outside of your operating hours. This setting merely provides a visual indication to requesters of when your venues are closed.

Show Venue Capacities

On the first screen of the Public Booking Request process, each publicly requestable venue is listed, along with its capacity (maximum occupancy). In some cases it may be desirable to hide the capacity information on this screen – especially if you don’t use MIDAS to schedule venues. This setting removes information on your venue capacities from your Public Booking Request screens.

Sort Booking Requests

With v4.04, you’ll be able to quickly sort received booking requests. You can sort them by either the date/time the booking request was made, or the date/time the requested booking starts. Sorting can be changed to either ascending or descending order, by simply clicking the corresponding heading. In earlier versions this sort was fixed to ascending booking start times.

New URL Custom Booking Field Type

MIDAS already allows you to add your own custom booking fields. These custom fields can either be single-line text, multi-line text, numeric, or drop-down list.
With v4.04 we’re adding a new custom booking field option: URL. This allows you to attach one or more internet addresses (URLs) to your bookings. These URLs become “clickable” allowing users to navigate to the URL.

This could be useful to link to the homepage of the organization that the booking is for. Or, you could link to a .pdf or Word document with further information about the booking. You could also use a URL field to link to an associated booking contract/insurance certificate… or anything you want!

Other New Settings

We’ve also added a couple of other new settings with v4.04…

Account for Pending Booking Requests when checking Booking Availability

By default, when making bookings, MIDAS doesn’t take into account any outstanding Pending Booking Requests when checking Booking Availability. For example, if a booking request is currently “pending” for Room 1 on Monday from 9am-10am, whilst it remains “pending”, other actual bookings can still be made for this venue/time slot.

To prevent any other bookings being made in slots where “pending” bookings are still awaiting approval, select this option. MIDAS will then show “Unavailable” for subsequent bookings that would conflict with outstanding booking requests.

Enable links for phone numbers (Skype integration)

If enabled, phone/cell numbers displayed within MIDAS will become clickable. If you have compatible software installed on your device, such as Skype, clicking these numbers within MIDAS initiate a call to the corresponding number.

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MIDAS v4.04 is expected to become available to Beta Testers soon, and then shortly after to become generally available.

Existing customers with an ongoing Annual Support Subscription will be entitled to a FREE update to v4.04 when it becomes available.

Also, did you know that during August we released TWO new addons for MIDAS? Read more about them here

Here are some of the new and improved features included the forthcoming v4.03 update to our web based booking software.

New Addons

API Access

RSS Feeds

Perhaps the most exciting new feature of MIDAS v4.03 is a new “addon” system. This may be accessed via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage Addons. Addons allow you to further extend the capabilities of your MIDAS.

Two brand new addons will initially be available, to coincide with the release of v4.03.

The first is a much requested API. The API allows developers to interface with MIDAS from their own software applications.

The second is an RSS Feed addon, allowing MIDAS to automatically generate customized RSS/Atom data feeds from your bookings.

New Invoice Settings

We’ve introduced two new invoice-related settings to MIDAS for v4.03 to help you better keep track of your invoices! There’s now a setting that will prevent modification/deletion of bookings for which invoices have been created. Additionally, there’s now a setting to prevent the deletion of invoices (once an invoice has been sent), until the invoice is paid in full.
And that’s not it for improvements to invoicing! In v4.03, you can also now filter invoices by client too!

Show More on Booking “Blocks”

In previous versions of MIDAS, you could specify a single booking field to be shown on booking “blocks” in the grid, and a field to show, along with the times of the booking, in a tooltip when hovering over the block

With MIDAS v4.03, there’s now options to display two booking fields on blocks and two fields on corresponding tooltips!

Improved “Grid Layout” Printing

In MIDAS v4.03, you can now generate even more versatile printouts of your bookings! We’ve given you the option to select, at time of printing, the booking field to be shown when printing bookings as a “grid”. Previously this had been fixed to show the name of the client/organization that each booking was for.

Performance Improvements

We constantly strive to make MIDAS as fast and efficient as possible. To that end we’ve number of performance improvements have been made in v4.03.
Various code optimizations have been found, and in places, the number of database queries has been reduced.

If you use “Watches“, one of the biggest performance improvements you’ll notice in v4.03, is that multiple bookings will be added/modified/deleted faster!

When emails are sent from MIDAS, this can take a second or so, as MIDAS (or rather the server itself) has to establish connections to a mail server and send data. In earlier versions of MIDAS, when it came to watches, a separate email would be generated/sent for each individual booking that “triggered” the watch. So for example, if you had 3 users all “watching” a particular venue for new bookings and another user then adds a booking to that venue every day for 5 days, MIDAS would generate a total of 15 notification emails (five for each of the three users watching the particular venue).

However, now, in v4.03, the same operation would only generate 3 notification emails (one for each user, each email containing a list of all five bookings). This reduction in the number of individual emails sent by MIDAS will result in a considerable improvement in performance and speed for customers who have “Watch” email notifications setup.

Our “cloud hosted” customers should also notice a small improvement on all page load times with MIDAS v4.03. This is due to a new internal setting that reduces certain re-directs. In turn, this should improve page load times by a few hundred milliseconds. Every millisecond counts!

New “Pastel” theme

We’ve created a new, optional, “Pastel” theme to coincide with MIDAS v4.03. The new “Pastel” theme features soft, pastel shade. It can be downloaded and installed to your MIDAS at https://mid.as/themes. The new “Pastel” theme is actually compatible with any version of MIDAS from v4.00 and above. You can preview it in action for yourself in our live online demo booking system.

UI Updates

As well as a new theme, a number of small updates to the UI (User Interface) have been made for v4.03. These include:

• When “jumping” to a booking from a search result, the selected booking will be indicated in the grid (its border will temporarily flash)
• When “jumping” to specific bookings (i.e. via Search or a “Client’s Other Bookings” link), relevant bookings are highlighted in the grid
• The animated “working” indicator is now shown in more places to indicate activity (i.e. when deleting multiple bookings)

Issues Fixed

MIDAS v4.03 includes a cumulative roll-up of fixes for all issues discovered since the initial release of v4.02