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Category: News

MIDAS v4.30 Out Now!

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April 30, 2022

We’re excited to announce that the latest update to our MIDAS room booking and resource scheduling software is now available.

Many of the new and improved features we add to our software come as a direct result of customer feedback, so please read on to find out what’s new in this feature-rich update, and how you can obtain it…

Highlights of MIDAS v4.30 include:

New: Review previously sent internal messages
New: Option to prompt for detailed client entry when adding bookings for new clients
New: Option to export invoices to Zoho Invoice
New: Email compatibility mode setting for improved rendering of invoices on older email clients
New: Option to auto-approve booking requests based upon their booking type
New: “Unfinalize” Invoices tool
New: Remove Obsolete Invoices tool
New: Maximum bookings allowed per user per calendar month/year options
New: “Default Time Interval” option of 60 minutes to only allow booking to the nearest hour
Improved: A third field can now be set to show on taller booking blocks (when the venue height setting is at least 40 pixels)
Improved: Expiration of tentative bookings is now recorded in the Recent Activity Log
Improved: A date range can now be specified when exporting invoices
Improved: Resource Popularity report can now be filtered by resource category
Improved: Manually creating a new invoice defaults to the globally defined tax rate
Optimization: Code optimization
Optimization: Database query optimization
Fixed: Cumulative roll-up of various fixes for issues discovered since v4.29

How To Get MIDAS v4.30…

New Customers:

You can try MIDAS v4.30 for yourself with no obligation to purchase!

We offer both a functional online public demo, as well as the opportunity for you to try MIDAS free for 30 days.

If you’ve decided that MIDAS is the right solution for your scheduling needs, then you can securely purchase online here.

“Self Hosted” Customers:

Self-Hosted customers with active Support Subscriptions will shortly be able to update to v4.30. It only takes a couple of clicks – simply log in to your MIDAS system and go to MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Update.

If no update is available, please check back again in a few days time, as we are staggering updates for self-hosted customers over the next few weeks.

“Cloud Hosted” Customers:

Cloud-Hosted customers don’t need to do anything! – All our active Cloud-Hosted MIDAS customers have already been automatically updated to this latest version of MIDAS.

Tags: v4.30

We Stand With Ukraine

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March 8, 2022

As governments around the world sanction Russia and its allies, like many software vendors, we here at MIDAS HQ are appalled and horrified by recent world events. We want to play our part to show our support and solidarity with Ukraine.

As more companies and businesses take it upon themselves to withdraw their products and services from Russia, we’re doing the same.

To that end, we’ve conducted a thorough review of our business operations in light of Russia’s abhorrent invasion of Ukraine.

Reviewing our operations

As you may be aware, MIDAS is a UK based business. However, we have customers in dozens of countries across the world.

We are pleased to report that our review found that we don’t currently have any active customers in either Russia or Belarus.

Now, whilst our administration resides in the UK, much of our network infrastructure is geographically located in US. (See: Where is MIDAS based?)

However, we have no physical or virtual presence, operations, or infrastructure in Russia, Belarus, or Ukraine.

That said, our network does utilize Cloudflare, a US company who provide CDN (Content Delivery Network) and website security services. Cloudflare do have network infrastructure in these countries. You can read more about Cloudflare’s stance in their post: “Steps we’ve taken around Cloudflare’s services in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia“

Whilst we’re helpless to stop the atrocities in Ukraine, there are some small actions that we can take in response.

Actions we’ve taken:

We’ve blocked access to our website and our customer’s cloud hosted MIDAS systems from Russian and Belarusian IP addresses.
We’ve blocked Yandex (Russia’s equivalent to Google Search) from crawling our website.
We’ve halted future sales of MIDAS to organizations located in, or with close connections to, Russia and Belarus.

We believe the above measures will be widely supported by our customers. These measures will remain in place until further notice.

We stand united with the people of Ukraine. Post-war we will look to further support Ukrainian organizations and businesses rebuild their operations and get back on their feet, by offering free licenses for our MIDAS scheduling software.

Tags: Belarus, Russia, Ukraine

MIDAS v4.29 Out Now!

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December 30, 2021

Merry Christmas! Even though 2021 has been another challenging year for many, we hope you’ve all been able to enjoy a better Christmas this year compared to the previous one.

Over the festive period, we released a new update to MIDAS, which we’re pleased to share details of with you here on our blog.

Highlights of MIDAS v4.29 include:

New: Two additional “Can Make Bookings” user permission options to restrict the user to only be able to book/request for themselves
New: “Mark as read” option for messages, reminders, and watch notifications in the Notification Center
New: Support for specifying a Reply-To email header
Improved: Additional Date Format settings to include named day of the week
Improved: Additional logout inactivity settings (5, 15, and 20 minute options)
Improved: Quickly reply to internal messages
Improved: Printing a monthly calendar no longer displays scrollbars in date cells
Improved: Display of multiple lengthy resource category names
Improved: Loading indicator shown during more navigation actions
Improved: Warning if trying to create an additional database with the same name as an existing database
Improved: Auto approved booking requests now logged in Recent Activity Log
Optimization: Code optimization
Optimization: Database query optimization
Fixed: Cumulative roll-up of various fixes for issues discovered since v4.28

How To Get MIDAS v4.29…

New Customers:

You can try MIDAS v4.29 for yourself with no obligation to purchase!

We offer both a functional public demo, as well as the opportunity for you to try MIDAS free for 30 days.

If you’ve decided that MIDAS is the right solution for your scheduling needs, then you can securely purchase online here.

“Self Hosted” Customers:

Self-Hosted customers with active Support Subscriptions will shortly be able to update to v4.29. It only takes a couple of clicks – simply log in to your MIDAS system and go to MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Update.

If no update is available, please check back again in a few days time, as we are staggering updates for self-hosted customers over the next few weeks.

“Cloud Hosted” Customers:

Cloud-Hosted customers don’t need to do anything! – All our active Cloud-Hosted MIDAS customers have been automatically updated to this latest version of MIDAS.

Tags: v4.29

A “Fair Usage” API policy for Cloud Hosted customers

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August 26, 2021

The MIDAS API allows developers to interface with a MIDAS booking system from their own code, applications, or websites.

This powerful addon is available as an option for both cloud-hosted and self-hosted MIDAS systems for an additional cost.

To help ensure maximum quality of service for all our cloud hosted customers, we will shortly be implementing a “Fair Usage” policy for API calls.

To clarify; this will only affect cloud-hosted customers using the optional MIDAS API. This does not affect self-hosted customers using the MIDAS API, and it does not affect non-API users.

Why the need for a “Fair Usage” API policy?

We recently became aware of a customer who was retrieving over 1GB of data each day from their cloud-hosted MIDAS system via automated API calls. On some days this would exceed over 1.5GB/day.

Now, we should stress that this customer was not acting maliciously in any way. They were not making an excessively high volume or frequency of API calls, but the calls that were being made were returning extremely large data sets every 10 minutes.

As a business, we obviously have to pay for our bandwidth (the amount of data transferred between our servers and customers), and so a customer pulling over 1GB of data from our servers everyday via the API becomes costly.

Therefore, going forward, we’ve decided to implement a “Fair Usage” policy on API calls made to cloud-hosted MIDAS systems.

What is the “Fair Usage” API policy?

The Fair Usage policy sets limits on the number of API calls that can be made in any given hour, and the amount of data that may be retrieved in any given 24 hour period.

Initially, these limits will be as follows *:

A maximum of 720 API calls per hour
A maximum of 480 MB of data per day

We believe API limits for cloud-hosted customers are generous, and from our analysis will not impact the vast majority of cloud-hosted API users.

* We reserve the right to review and amend these limits in the future. The current limits may always be found here.

What happens if I exceed these API limits?

Most API users will not be impacted by this change. However, should you exceed these limits, API access to your MIDAS system will be temporarily suspended, with subsequent API calls returning an error. API access will be automatically re-instated once API usage falls below these limits again.

We’ve also provided useful advice on how you can reduce API usage by optimizing your API calls.

Can I monitor my API usage?

It would be unfair of us to introduce a “Fair Usage” policy without providing a way for customers to monitor their API usage.

As such, we’ve just released an updated API (v2.48) in which you can view your current API usage via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage Addons → API Access.

API usage may also be monitored directly through the API itself via a new “util_api_usage” call.

When will this policy come into effect?

Cloud-hosted API users can now monitor their current API usage as outlined above.

We’re allowing a grace period before we implement our new API “fair usage” policy.

The “Fair Usage” policy will start being enforced from Monday 13th September 2021.

Can I opt-out of the “Fair Usage” policy?

Our API “Fair Usage” policy (which only applies to cloud-hosted customers) cannot be opted out of.

However, if you find that you regularly exceed the new API limits and are unable to refactor your code to reduce the frequency of API requests and/or the amount of data returned by your API calls, then please contact us to discuss increasing your API limits.

Alternatively, you could consider migrating to a self-hosted MIDAS system. API calls to self-hosted MIDAS systems do not have any usage limits imposed.

We thank you for your understanding and co-operation in helping us to ensure quality of service for all our cloud-hosted customers.

Should you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us, and we’ll be happy to help!

Tags: API