Category: Development

Do more direct from the Booking Grid!

2 minute read time · Updated January 6, 2023 · First published May 6, 2012

In MIDAS v4 we’re making the process of moving/rescheduling bookings incredibly simple!!

Until now, if you needed to move a booking to a different venue, or perhaps postpone it until the following week, you’d have to click on the booking in the grid, select “Modify Booking”, then manually change the venue/dates/times on the “Modify Booking Form”. After that you’d have to proceed through the “Booking Availability” check before the booking is finally rescheduled – all in all requiring half a dozen or more mouse clicks and at least a couple of minutes as you went through the various steps.

In MIDAS v4 you can reschedule bookings in seconds…
…simply “drag and drop” the existing booking to a new venue/time slot!

Drag and Drop Bookings to Reschedule

Display pending/provisional and deleted bookings in the grid!

Moving bookings is not all you can do from the improved booking grid in v4! You can now also show pending booking requests as well as recently deleted bookings in the booking grid too!

Pending booking requests can then be approved/queried/modified/rejected/locked direct from the booking grid with just a click:

Approve Provisional Booking Requests from the Grid

..and deleted bookings can be restored in the same way too:

Recover Deleted Bookings

Generate Invoices directly from the grid!

Generate Invoice

Don’t want to generate an invoice when making a booking? No problem! In MIDAS v4 you can click a booking in the grid and instantly generate an invoice for that booking!

These exciting new improvements to the booking grid in MIDAS v4 will undoubtedly improve your productivity by streamlining the process of rescheduling bookings, approving requests, and recovering erroneously deleted bookings!

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Improvements To Booking Requests

2 minute read time · Updated January 17, 2024 · First published May 3, 2012

We’ve been busy developing a major new update to our scheduling software, MIDAS.

This update packed full of new and improved features, many of which have originated from ideas and suggestions from our existing users.

An often requested feature is to have the ability to “route” booking requests to different users, depending upon the venue being requested.

Currently, all booking requests received by your MIDAS system go into a central “pool”. From this pool, any user with the “Can Process Web Requests” permission can view, approve, query, modify, reject, or lock the requests.

In MIDAS v4 however, Booking Requests can be routed to different users based upon the venue that’s been requested!

You can essentially configure which requests go to which administrators. In an educational setting this would, for example, allow sports staff to manage requests for your sporting facilities. At the same time, office staff could separately manage incoming requests for your meeting rooms.

How it works…

In MIDAS v4, you’ll find a new “Managers” tab on the “Manage Venues” screen.

From this tab, you can assign one or more existing users to “manage” booking requests for the selected venue:

Assigning Managers to Venues in MIDAS
Assigning Venue Managers in MIDAS

Then, when a member of the public then makes a booking request for that venue, “managers” of that venue are sent an automated email notification by MIDAS. This informs them that a new pending booking request requires attention. These email notifications may be turned on/off at any time through the manager’s “Pending Booking Requests” screen.

The manager can then log in to MIDAS and go to their Pending Booking Requests screen. From here, they’ll see outstanding requests for all the venues they manage. Booking requests can be approved with a click of the mouse.

The Booking Request screen also offers additional functions. Requests can be modified – for instance, they can be moved to a different time, date, venue, etc. Requests can also be rejected, queried with the original requester, or locked. Locking a request prevents any other manager from processing the booking request whilst you’re dealing with it. For example, you may need to query something with the client before approving their request and don’t want another user approving their request in the interim.

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New Weekly & Multi-Day Views

2 minute read time · Updated February 13, 2025 · First published April 30, 2012

We’ve been busy at MIDAS HQ for the past 6 months working on a major update to MIDAS. This update is packed full of new features and improvements. May of these are as a result of customer feedback and suggestions.

This major update, MIDAS version 4, is anticipated to be available this Summer. But because we’re so excited about it, over the next few weeks, we’re going to be blogging about some of the new features and improvements to give you a first look at what’s in store! …and we can promise you, you won’t be disappointed!

New for MIDAS v4: Weekly & Multiple Day Views

In earlier versions of our room booking web app, you could view your bookings in two ways – in a “daily” view and a “monthly” overview. The daily view displayed bookings for a single selected calendar date. The monthly view gave a quick overview of bookings taking place during a calendar month. One request we often hear from customers is for there to also be a “week” view as well. Well, for MIDAS v4, we’ve gone one better!!

In MIDAS v4 you will be able to view the now familiar booking grid over a date range you control of between 1-14 days on one single screen!

Here are the very first screenshots from MIDAS v4 showing the new booking grid:

5-Day Week View:

5 day view of bookings in MIDAS
5 day view of bookings in MIDAS

7-Day Week View:

7 day (weekly view) of bookings in MIDAS
7 day (weekly) view of bookings in MIDAS

14-Day View:

14 day (two week) view of bookings in MIDAS
14 day (two week) view of bookings in MIDAS
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What’s new in MIDAS v3.15

3 minute read time · Updated July 21, 2023 · First published February 1, 2012

MIDAS v3.15 is nearing completion, so we thought we’d take a moment to tell you about this upcoming update!

Improved Hours of Operation

The most exciting improvement in v3.15 is a complete redesign of the “Hours of Operation” screen for your venues. Previously, you were able to set a single opening and closing time for each day of the week per venue. Outside of these hours, no bookings would then be permitted. This worked great if a venue was open from say 9am-5pm. However, if there were multiple open/closed periods during a single day – i.e. 9am – 1pm, 2pm – 5pm, the “Hours of Operation” settings could not accommodate for these.

So, following feedback from our customers, we’ve made this possible in v3.15:

Hours of Operation

The “Hours of Operation” screen is now a grid of 24 x 7 squares. Each square represents a one hour period of time. Clicking a green square will turn it red. A red square means that the venue is closed during that particular hour of the week. Clicking the square again will turn it green, meaning that it is open during that hour.

You can also close a venue in 15 minute increments by right-clicking a square in the grid instead of left-clicking. For example, right clicking on a full green square once will close that venue for the first 15 mins of the selected hour. Right-clicking for a second time will close the venue for the first 30 mins of the hour. A third right click will close the venue for the first 45 mins of the hour. Continuing to right-click will allow you to instead close the venue for the last 45, 30, and 15 minutes of the hour.

Sort Bookings on Print Outs

There’s also a new print setting in v3.15. This allows you to change the sort order in which your bookings are printed. In previous versions, printing a set of bookings will print them in chronological order. In v3.15, you’re now able to sort them by venue, type, client, or indeed any other booking field. You can also sort in either ascending or descending order too!

Find Similar Bookings Across Custom Date Ranges

We’ve also introduced a date range selector on the modify/delete similar bookings screen. This allows you to restrict the search results to a specific date range. Previously, a similar bookings search would return all future matching bookings. Depending on how far in advance you add bookings to MIDAS, this could return a large number of results. So this new filter is more efficient, by only returning only those matching bookings you’re actually interested in.

There are also a number of small issues that have been addressed in v3.15 that were identified since the release of v3.14 in October last year.

Want to try v3.15 for yourself now? – Why not become a Beta Tester. We’re looking for people to “road test” upcoming versions of our software to help us identify any issues/bugs before they are released. This is crucial in ensuring a rock-solid product, so we’d really appreciate your help! – You don’t need to be a programmer, and you can spend as much or as little time beta testing as you’d like, all we ask is that you have a play and if you spot any issues let us know so we can fix them!

If you’d like to help make our software better by becoming a tester, please visit mid.as/betatesters

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