Category: News

Earth Hour 2015 – We’re doing it again!

3 minute read time · Updated August 17, 2024 · First published March 27, 2015
Earth Hour 2015

For the past couple of years, we’ve been proud to be part of “Earth Hour“. Each year, millions of people across the world switch off lights for a whole 60 minutes to raise awareness of climate change.

This annual event first began in 2007. It is now a global event marked in more than 162 countries and territories worldwide. Organized by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), its purpose is to encourage individuals, communities, households and businesses to turn off their non-essential lights for one hour. This is to demonstrate their commitment to our planet through a symbolic reduction in their energy consumption.

We are once again very happy to be supporting this year’s effort which takes place on Saturday 28th March between 8.30pm-9.30pm in whatever timezone you’re in!

Now, as you can probably appreciate, running a global web-based business like MIDAS consumes a fair amount of energy to keep our infrastructure up and running year-on-year.

At the same time, we take our environmental responsibilities very seriously! We’ve already invested in servers with extremely low power consumption. In fact, some of our administrative servers draw as little as 18w of power! We have also now replaced traditional mechanical hard drives in virtually all of our public-facing servers with newer, faster, yet more energy efficient Solid State Drives (SSDs). Within the next few months ALL our public-facing servers will be running with SSDs in them!

We also work hard in the development of our MIDAS software itself to optimize its disk, memory, and CPU usage. Factors which all in turn help to reduce the amount of power consumption on servers running MIDAS. Whether that’s on our cloud servers for our “hosted” customers, or on our “self hosted” customer’s own servers.

We believe that everyone, not just individuals but other web & cloud based businesses like ours, can reduce their energy footprint and show they care about our planet. That’s why at 8.30pm (UTC, as we’re based in the UK) on Saturday, we’ll once again be joining in with “Earth Hour”. We’ll be switching off non-essential systems – not just our lights – for 1 hour.

Note: This will not affect access to our main website, or prevent our “hosted” customers from accessing their MIDAS booking systems during this period. However our non-essential administrative systems will be shut down for 60 minutes. This may lead to a slight delay in responses to emails received during this period, etc.

So go on, make a difference with us and support Earth Hour at 8.30pm on Saturday wherever you are in the world!

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We’re 9 years old today!

2 minute read time · Updated February 8, 2025 · First published March 11, 2015

Happy 9th Birthday, MIDAS!We’re celebrating a birthday today – ours! Yes, it’s been 9 years to the day since the very first version of MIDAS was publicly released back on 11th March 2006. Since then our software has grown and developed to become a leading world-class web based booking and scheduling system which is trusted by organizations of all sizes and types around the globe!

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank all our customers – whether you’ve been with us just a short time, or been with us since the beginning! We love seeing the joy our software brings to customers and how it helps makes their lives and facilities administration easier!

Some of the important factors customers carefully consider when looking for a potential new room booking system for their venue is how long has it been around? ..and how often is it updated?

Whilst there are a handful of other room booking systems that have been around longer than ours, the majority of these are no longer maintained/updated. We’ve been around now for nine years, and our software remains in active development today!

So, if you’re not yet a customer, but are looking for a new room booking system for your venue, one that’s regularly updated with new features, and one backed by a proven track record of outstanding customer service for the past 9 years – then look no further than MIDAS!

Do you #loveMIDAS?

2 minute read time · Updated January 25, 2021 · First published February 12, 2015

MIDAS Web Based Room and Resource Booking Software

It’s nearly that time of year again, folks – Valentine’s Day! #loveMIDAS …and just like last year we’re feeling all loved up, and want to share the love with you again!

So, whether you’ve been considering MIDAS for your organization’s room and resource scheduling needs, or you’re an existing customer, to celebrate Valentine’s Day – February 14th – for a limited time we’re offering 14% off new purchases of MIDAS, and for our existing customers; 14% off your next Annual Support Subscription renewal!

To take advantage of this limited offer all you need to do is:

  1. First, make sure you’re following us on Twitter @mid_as
  2. Tweet the world and tell them why you love our MIDAS scheduling software using the hashtag #loveMIDAS and be sure to include a link to our website, //mid.as

We’ll then send you a Direct Message through Twitter containing a special code you can use to get 14% off your purchase, or if you’re an existing customer we’ll let you know that we’re deducting 14% off your next renewal cost!

Stuck for ideas of what to Tweet?

Here’s what a couple of our customers tweeted last year:

You can also check out some more of the love our existing customers have for MIDAS here

So, get tweeting and tell us, why do you #loveMIDAS this Valentine’s day?

Terms & Conditions:
1. This promotion ends Monday 16th February 2015 at Noon (UTC) any Tweets made after this time will not be eligible.
2. Discount codes are valid for new purchases of MIDAS made before the end of February 2015 only.
3. For existing customers, Annual Support Subscription discounts apply to their next renewal only and are “one time” (i.e. non-recurring).
4. Tweets originating from fake Twitter accounts or those deemed, at our sole discretion, to be engaging in “spam” will be disqualified from entry.
5. Tweets originating from private Twitter accounts (accounts where tweets are “protected” and not visible to non-followers) are not eligible to take part in this promotion.
6. Only one discount is available per organization and/or Twitter account. Multiple tweets from the same organization and/or Twitter account, whilst welcomed, will only be eligible for this promotion once.
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MIDAS v4.08 Now Available!

3 minute read time · Updated May 5, 2020 · First published January 12, 2015

It’s the start of a brand new year, and we’re excited to bring you the latest update to our web based room booking and resource scheduling software, MIDAS – Version 4.08.

MIDAS v4.08 features a wealth of new & improved features, many of which are once again as a direct result of feedback and suggestions from our customers across the globe!

Here’s what’s new and improved in MIDAS v4.08:

  • New: Automatically generate Cancellation Fee invoices for bookings cancelled at short notice
  • New: Scheduled Task option to automatically send any unsent invoices
  • New: Option to prevent invoices from ever being deleted
  • New: Option to send/force booking confirmations to be sent by default
  • New: “Potential Income” Venue statistics
  • Improved: Generating Repetitive Bookings when multiple dates already selected will add to (rather than replace) date selection
  • Improved: HiContrast Theme (gradient removed from booking blocks)
  • Improved: Resources now indicated in Booking Confirmation emails
  • Improved: Manage Venues, Manage Booking Types, and Re-Order Fields screens improved for mobile/tablet/touch devices
  • Improved: iPhone 6 Plus support
  • Improved: Generation of invoices for “all clients” over a date range will now generate in ascending date/time order (previously in order bookings were added to MIDAS)
  • Improved: Invoices can be re-emailed to clients when partly-paid or overdue
  • Improved: Repetitive Booking Generator now includes options for repeating every 5 or 6 weeks
  • Improved: Timezone selection
  • Improved: Support for Perl architectures where POSIX::tzset isn’t implemented (i.e. Strawberry Perl)
  • Improved: Adding/Modifying/Deleting Custom Fields now logged in Recent Activity
  • Improved: You can now define which booking fields should be included in Booking Confirmation Emails
  • Optimization: MySQL query & memory footprint reduction
  • Optimization: Image optimization
  • Update: System requirements (browsers)
  • Security enhancements
  • Fixed: Cumulative roll-up of various fixes for issues discovered since v4.07 – see https://bugs.mid.as for details

How To Get MIDAS v4.08

Existing self-hosting MIDAS customers with a valid Annual Support Subscription can update to v4.08 from within the software via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Update.

Customers who instead have their MIDAS “remotely hosted” by us don’t need to do anything – we’ve already automatically updated you to v4.08 this past weekend!

2015 – A new year… a new start?

Not yet using MIDAS for your organization’s facility scheduling needs? As it’s the start of a new year, now would be an ideal time to make a fresh start, and finally take back control over your room bookings and resource scheduling with our intuitive, powerful and easy to use, web based software!

To find out more, check out the features of MIDAS, view screenshots, or give MIDAS a try online now.

If you’re still not convinced that MIDAS can help your organization streamline and simplify its booking and reservation process, read what some of our existing customers say, and then get MIDAS working for your organization today!

Keep Your Browser Up-to-date!

Supported Browsers We want you to have the best possible user experience when using MIDAS in your favorite Web Browser. We support our web based scheduling software in all major browsers (including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera). A list of minimum and recommended browser versions can be found at https://mid.as/browsers.

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