News Archives - MIDAS - Room Booking System

Category: News

MIDAS v4.38 Out Now!

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January 21, 2025

We have a new update available to our MIDAS booking software. This update includes improvements to custom fields, booking requests, printing, privacy, and more.

Here’s what new and improved in v4.38…

Authenticator App Support

Since 2015, all MIDAS room booking systems have included optional two-factor authentication (2FA). If enabled, this adds an additional layer of account security to our software.

With Two-Factor Authentication enabled, each time a user logins in, a code is sent to their email inbox. The user must then enter this code into MIDAS in order to complete their log in.

MIDAS v4.38 now additionally supports TOTP authenticator apps – including Google Authenticator and Microsoft Authenticator – as an alternative 2FA login option – Read more…

2FA Per User Account

In addition to supporting authenticator apps, we’ve also made two-factor authentication a ‘per user’ setting, rather than a ‘global’ setting.

This allows administrators to set 2FA methods for each individual user account.

Per-User Two Factor Authentication Login Settings

Reinstall Current Version

For self-hosted customers, we’ve improved the MIDAS installer to allow re-installing your current software version without affecting your existing data/settings.

So if you accidentally delete a core file within your MIDAS installation on your web server, you can re-install MIDAS without loosing any data!

Improved Security Audit

All MIDAS systems come with a built in ‘Security Audit’ tool to assess the security of your booking system. This tool may either be run on-demand or regularly scheduled.

For MIDAS v4.38 we’ve included a new check as part of these ‘Security Audits’. This new check will alert you if there are any ‘obsolete’ user accounts within your MIDAS system. An ‘obsolete’ user account is considered to be any user account which has not been logged into for at least 6 months.

Improved Booking Grid performance

The ‘Booking Grid’ is the main area where your bookings are visually presented within MIDAS.

We’ve made some improvements to the performance of the booking grid in v4.38 by reducing the amount of data that’s initially loaded when viewing bookings for any given date.

For busy organizations with hundreds of bookings across their venues in any given day, the amount of data being loaded in the booking grid was significant, and could lead to sluggish loading.

We’ve significantly improved this for v4.38, meaning that large quantities of bookings now load and display faster than ever!

Other Improvements

This latest version of MIDAS also includes stability and performance improvements and fixes for several issues that have been detected or reported since the previous release (v4.37) – View the complete v4.38 changelog….

How To Get MIDAS v4.38…

New to MIDAS?

You can try MIDAS v4.38 for FREE with no obligation to buy!

There’s both a functional online public demo, and you can also try MIDAS free for 30 days.

We offer a choice of both cloud and self hosted solutions. So if you’re ready to get MIDAS working for your organization, purchase or subscribe today via our secure website.

“Self Hosted” Customers:

Self-Hosted customers with active Support Subscriptions can update to v4.38, and it only takes a couple of clicks.

Simply log in to your MIDAS system and go to MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Update.

“Cloud Hosted” Customers:

All our active Cloud-Hosted customers MIDAS systems have previously been update to v4.38.

We seamlessly apply software updates for our cloud hosted customers. So you’ll always have access to the latest features, and never need to worry about running outdated software.

Tags: v4.38

Consistently Delivering Exceptional Customer Support

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January 15, 2025

There’s nothing more frustrating than emailing a business for help and then having to wait ages for a real person to reply, right? Sometimes it can take days for any sort of human response from a business. And if it’s out-of-hours, a weekend or public holiday, this can further add to the annoyance in awaiting their response.

We do things differently!

We know that one of the key factors that sets our room booking software solutions miles apart from our competitors is our exceptional customer support. Not only are our support staff professional, friendly, and knowledgeable – they provide a fast response to queries too!

How do we know this? – Because our customers tell us!

“As someone who also works in the technical support industry, I am thoroughly impressed not only by the speed of satisfactory resolution but also from the fact that it was outside normal working hours!!!

I fully expected this to be picked up the next day and take a few days to fix.”

That’s recent feedback from a customer who emailed us with an issue at 5.40pm one Thursday evening. Within 90 minutes, we’d been able to diagnose and replicate the cause of his issue, update the customer, and seamlessly push an update out to his cloud-hosted MIDAS system to address it.

To ensure that we continue to maintain these high levels of service 365 days a year, one of the metrics we continually monitor is the speed of response to each Priority Support query.

In fact, we’re so proud of our responsiveness that we’re totally transparent about how our support team are performing. We even publish real-time live data over on our dedicated Service Status site.

As 2025 gets underway, we’ve also taken a few moments to review our support performance over the past several years. Here is how we’ve performed in recent times:

Priority Support Emails…	2019	2020	2021	2022	2023	2024
Answered within 15 minutes	64.24%	65.86%	55.16%	56.81%	53.31%	50.38%
Answered within 30 minutes	81.68%	82.32%	77.00%	73.09%	70.53%	72.14%
Answered within 1 hour	90.73%	93.22%	91.31%	88.70%	86.09%	86.26%
Answered within 2 hours	97.13%	98.55%	96.24%	93.69%	94.70%	97.33%
Answered within 3 hours	98.68%	99.03%	97.42%	96.68%	98.01%	98.09%
Answered within 4 hours	98.68%	99.52%	98.12%	97.34%	99.67%	99.24%
Answered within 5 hours	99.34%	99.76%	99.30%	98.34%	100%	100%
Answered within 6 hours	100%	100%	99.77%	98.67%	100%	100%
Answered within 7 hours	100%	100%	100%	99.67%	100%	100%
Answered within 8 hours	100%	100%	100%	100%	100%	100%

Percentage of Priority Support Email response times

We also looked at the “average” response time across the same period:

Priority Support Emails…	2019	2020	2021	2022	2023	2024
Average Response Time	23 minutes	20 minutes	27 minutes	34 minutes	30 minutes	28 minutes

Average Response Times for Priority Support Emails between 2019 and 2024

Key Takeaways

Over the past 6 years, our Priority Support service has achieved consistent response times.
More than half of all Priority Support emails are responded to by a human within 15 minutes of receipt.
In 2024, the average response time to a Priority Support email was just 28 minutes.
Over the past 2 years, all Priority Support emails were responded to by a human within 5 hours of receipt, regardless of the day of week or time of day.
Even during a global pandemic, our support continued to be robust and responsive.

Our rock solid uptime and unrivalled support are just a couple of the reasons our customers choose – and indeed stick with – MIDAS for their business needs year on year.

So if you’re considering a new room booking system in 2025, and have been frustrated by your existing provider’s lacklustre response times previous, look no further!

We think you’ll be hard pushed to find a product back-up by 365 days a year support as efficient as MIDAS!

But if you’re still not convinced, check out some more of our Customer Testimonials about our booking solution, and the outstanding levels support we consistently provide year on year!

Oh, and we’re also rated ‘Excellent’ on TrustPilot where you can read more reviews.

Have questions and not sure whether MIDAS is right for you? Why not reach out to our sales team (who are just as friendly as our support team!)

Tags: support

Expiration warnings in older self-hosted MIDAS systems

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December 18, 2024

Our self-hosted edition of MIDAS allows you to install and run the booking system on your own server and infrastructure.

Unlike our cloud-hosted edition, which has a subscription based pricing model, our self-hosted edition is essentially a “perpetual license“. This means that once purchased, you may then use it indefinitely.

That said, we do have an optional annual support subscription available to our self-hosted customers.

A support subscription entitles you to software updates and access to priority support for the duration of your subscription. It’s really important to keep your software up to date, and so we highly encourage all self-hosted customers to take out an annual support subscription.

Because of the risks associated with the running outdated software, in older (now obsolete and unsupported) versions of MIDAS, we implemented a ‘soft expiration’.

This meant that after a certain date, obsolete software would cease to function.

The arbitrary date we set originally was 1st January 2025.

However, this is only a ‘soft’ expiration. The software itself isn’t altered or ‘crippled’ in any way after this date, and the soft expiration can be lifted upon request.

If you’re currently running a self-hosted MIDAS system and you originally installed a version of MIDAS prior to v4.30 (April 2022) then you may be affected.

When accessing your MIDAS system, you may see a notification on the login page that your license is about to expire.

If you have an active subscription…

If you see this message prior to 1st January 2025, please update your MIDAS system as soon as possible (and before 1st January 2025) via MIDAS Admin Options > Manage MIDAS > Update.

Once updated, the expiration notice will be removed and you can continue using MIDAS as normal.

If you’re seeing an expiration notice after 1st January 2025, then you will need to use our online Self Service tool to generate an updated configuration file for your obsolete software to continue using it after 1st January 2025.

If you don’t have an active subscription…

The current version of MIDAS is v4.37 (with v4.38 about to land)

If you’re currently running an older version then not only are you missing out on new features and bug fixes, you’re also missing out on important security improvements and enhancements which could put your MIDAS system at risk.

We would therefore strongly recommend that you consider taking out an annual support subscription for your obsolete MIDAS system. This will allow you to update the software to the current version.

Once updated, the expiration notice on your MIDAS login screen will also be removed.

If you don’t wish to update your MIDAS system, then you will need to use our online Self Service tool to generate an updated configuration file for your obsolete software to continue using it after 1st January 2025.

How to resolve this license expiration issue using our Self Service Tool

Go to https://selfservice.mid.as and click the “Select File” button.
Select the “midas.dat” (or “midasglobal.dat”) file from within your current MIDAS installation.
Click the “Generate new midas.dat” (or “Generate new midasglobal.dat”) button.
You’ll be prompted to download a new midas.dat/midasglobal.dat file.
Replace the current midas.dat/midasglobal.dat file in MIDAS installation with this newly generated file.

Tags: license, self-hosted, support

MIDAS v4.37 Out Now!

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September 2, 2024

We have a new update available to our MIDAS booking software. This update includes improvements to custom fields, booking requests, printing, privacy, and more.

Here’s what new and improved in v4.37…

Quickly Process Multiple Booking Requests

Selectively process multiple booking requests in MIDAS v4.37

Until now, booking requests could only be approved one by one, or every request could be “bulk” approved at once. For v4.37, we’ve introduced selective approval which saves time by allowing multiple booking requests to be approved in a single one action – Read more…

Custom Field Improvements

Custom “Text Areas” can now have a height set, and be set to be resizable too. Additionally, custom file upload fields can be configured to either view or save/download attached files – Read more…

Invoicing Improvements

Updating an invoice’s internal notes is now recorded in the Recent Activity audit log. Also, manual quotation payments for tentative bookings can now also update the booking’s type – Read more…

Better Support for “Shared” email addresses

If you have individuals using the public booking/request features of your MIDAS system, and they’re making bookings/requests on behalf of multiple organizations but using their personal email address for each, then v4.37 has improved support for such “shared” email addresses – Read more…

Day Notes can now appear on booking printouts

Notes that are attached to specific calendar dates in your booking system can now be set to be included on booking printouts – Read more…

Deprecating some outdated settings

We’ve removed the “SSL Access” setting, and changed the “Allowed IP Range” setting to now only be available in cloud-hosted edition – Read more…

Other Improvements

This latest version of MIDAS also includes stability and performance improvements, theme/UI updates, and fixes for several issues that have been detected or reported since the previous release (v4.36) – View the complete v4.37 changelog….

How To Get MIDAS v4.37…

New to MIDAS?

You can try MIDAS v4.37 for FREE with no obligation to purchase!

There’s both a functional online public demo, and you can also try MIDAS free for 30 days.

We offer a choice of both cloud and self hosted solutions. So if you’re ready to get MIDAS working for your organization, purchase or subscribe today via our secure website.

“Self Hosted” Customers:

Self-Hosted customers with active Support Subscriptions can update to v4.37, and it only takes a couple of clicks.

Simply log in to your MIDAS system and go to MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Update.

We’re currently undertaking a phased roll out of this update rolling out to self-hosted customers. So if there’s no update shown as available to you today, please try again in a few days time.

“Cloud Hosted” Customers:

All our active Cloud-Hosted customers MIDAS systems have already been update to v4.37.

We seamlessly apply software updates for our cloud hosted customers. So you’ll always have access to the latest features, and never need to worry about running outdated software.

Tags: v4.37