Category: News

Easter Discount on our Room Scheduling Software

Easter Deals To celebrate Easter, we’ve got our very own virtual Easter Egg Hunt underway! – Simply explore our main website https://mid.as this Easter, and find a large Easter egg hidden somewhere within the site.

If you can find the egg, crack it open by clicking it, and the egg will reveal a code you can use over the Easter weekend to get a very special discount off your purchase of our popular web based room scheduling software, MIDAS.

On behalf of our team, we wish you all a very Happy Easter!

PLEASE NOTE: This promotion ran during Easter 2012, and has since ended. To view our current prices, please visit https://mid.as/pricing


New Tool to Check Your Server Can Run MIDAS

We offer our web based room scheduling software for download and use on your own web server, or alternatively if you don’t have access to a web server that meets our Minimum System Requirements, we can instead “host your MIDAS in the cloud“.

Today we’ve released a new tool to help you determine whether your web server is capable of running MIDAS. Our “Server Readiness” tool is a small Perl script which can be uploaded to your server, and then accessed through your web browser. This tool will then perform a series of tests on your server and alert you to any potential issues that may prevent your from installing and/or running MIDAS on your server. If issues are detected, the “Server Readiness” tool will offer helpful insights into how each issue may be addressed!

The Server Readiness script checks over 10 different parameters to ensure that you have the correct Perl modules installed on your server, no conflicting extensions are present, scripts can read/write to your server, there is enough free space remaining on your disk quota, and that your server is able to establish a connection to the internet.

Test your server configuration

The above is a screenshot of the “Server Readiness” tool finding no issues with a server.

Check your server configuration

The above is a screenshot of the “Server Readiness” tool finding an issue with the server’s configuration, and offering a solution to fix the problem.

How to use this tool:

  1. Download the servercheck.pl script
  2. Upload it to your server at the location where you plan on installing MIDAS
  3. Grant the script “execute” permission i.e. CHMOD 755 (if applicable to your server)
  4. If the location where Perl is located on your server isn’t “/usr/bin/perl” you may need to edit the first line of the servercheck.pl file to reflect the correct location
  5. Access the servercheck.pl file via its corresponding URL in your web browser and follow the on-screen instructions

UPDATE 18th May 2012:
We’ve just updated our Server Readiness tool in advance of the upcoming release of MIDAS v4 so you can ensure that your server is ready for this major update!


New Tool to Import Clients into MIDAS

One of the things we frequently get asked by our customers is; “Is there a way to import my existing data into MIDAS?”. Well, we’ve listened to you, and have now released an easy-to-use import tool to allow you to do just that!

Using our free import tool, you can import client data into MIDAS v3.00 or later, that is either in a .csv (Comma Separated Values), or a .txt (Tab, or other character, Delimited) file format.

This means that provided your 3rd party application allows you to export client/contact data in one of these formats, you can easily import it directly into MIDAS!

You can also use our import tool to import data directly from a spreadsheet application, such as Microsoft’s Excel!

We’ve even given you the option to replace, or simply add to your existing client data when importing new data!

Here’s a few screenshots of the new import tool:

Step 1 - Select data to import
Step 2 - Import settings
Step 3 - Import data

For further information, and to download our free import tool, please see our How do I import client data from another application into MIDAS? knowledge base article.


What’s new in MIDAS v3.15

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