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

More Versatile Options For Booking Times

In previous versions of MIDAS, when specifying the times that bookings take place, you were presented with options to set a start and finish time:

We wanted to make specifying booking times even easier and more flexible, that’s why v4.02 will introduce two new time field options: “periods” and “durations“.

Predefined Time Periods

If you only wish your users to book in predefined time slots (“periods”) during the day, this option is just what you need!
You can set up a list of predefined periods of time, with each “period” having it’s own name.
For example, let’s say you’re running MIDAS within a school or other educational environment. In v4.02 you’ll be able to add your school day as a list of predefined time periods, for instance:

This way, instead of previously having to manually select a start time of 11:15 and a finish time of 12:15 on the booking form if a user wanted to book during “Lesson 3”, with this option those fields will be replaced with a simple drop-down list from which they can easily pick “Lesson 3”!

There are no limits on the number of predefined “period” lists you can set up. What’s more you can also specify on a per-user basis which particular list of time “periods” is shown!

Start Time + Predefined Duration

If all your bookings (or appointments) should be of a standard, predetermined length, this new option will be ideal for you!
MIDAS v4.02 will allow you to set up a list of predefined booking durations (in Minutes) that will replace the original “finish” time field. That way, users can simply select a start time for their booking, and a duration.

As with the “period” lists, you can set up multiple lists of booking durations and specify which list should be shown to which user!

As these three booking time options (Start + Finish, Start + Duration, and Periods) can be specified on a per user basis, the flexibility this gives is unmatched! These powerful new booking time options make MIDAS an even better scheduling choice for schools, as well as for businesses that need to schedule appointments!

---

Monthly Repetitive Booking Generator

MIDAS already includes a quick way to generate dates for repetitive bookings i.e. “every Monday for the next 6 weeks”, etc.. but many users have asked for a quick way to generate dates for monthly recurring bookings, say on “the 2nd Thursday of every month”, etc… so we’re giving you just that in v4.02!

---

Approve/Reject Booking Requests “Silently”

When you approve or reject a Booking Request, MIDAS automatically sends an email notification to the original requester informing them that their booking request has been either approved, or rejected (together with a reason for the rejection).
In MIDAS v4.02, we’re including a simple way to override the sending of these notifications so that you can approve/reject requests “silently” without the original requester being informed of your action.

---

Send “Booking Reminders” to your external calendar (Outlook, Lightning, etc)

The “Booking Reminder” feature currently allows you to quickly add a reminder for any booking to your “My Messages” screen within MIDAS. In v4.02, we’re also introducing the ability to have these reminders emailed to you as calendar events. That way, if your mail client has an associated calendar application (such as Outlook, or Lighting (for Thunderbird)) you can quickly add these events to your external calendar with just a single click!

---

Other new features in v4.02:

• The Monthly Overview can now be printed via the “Print” toolbar icon
• New option to only accept booking requests from certain email domains
• Norwegian translation

---

MIDAS v4.02 is expected to be available to Beta Testers later this month, with a full release shortly after.
If you’d like to help us test this new version, why not become a Beta Tester?

In the meantime, as it’s Valentines Day and love is in the air, why not help us spread the love and take a moment to share MIDAS with your friends and colleagues on your favorite social networking sites