Conditional Auto-Approval For Booking Requests

3 minute read time · Updated March 12, 2024

The Public Booking Request feature of MIDAS allows non-users to check the availability of your rooms, and submit booking “requests” online. No user account or login is required in order to make a public booking requests.

When a booking request is made, “managers” for the requested venue are notified by MIDAS. They can then log in and quickly approve, reject, or modify the pending request.

The ability to have different managers for different rooms allows incoming requests to be filtered to the right department/person within your organization.

Public Booking Requesting is one of the most popular features of our software. It is a well feature widely used by our customers in their booking operations.

Auto Approval of Booking Requests

Back in October 2013 – with the release on MIDAS v4.04, we introduced the option to have all booking requests “auto approved”. With this option enabled, MIDAS would automatically approve all incoming booking requests with no manager intervention required.

Many customers don’t need this functionality, and instead prefer to manually review and approve each incoming booking request.

But for organizations such as large universities which allow students to book their own study rooms, the ability to have booking requests auto-approved is a real time saver.

Selective Auto-Approval

To extend this auto approve functionality though, we’re introducing a new option for MIDAS v4.27:

Automatically approve booking requests that originate from certain email domains or addresses — Auto-Approve Booking Requests from certain domains/addresses

Now, if the “Auto-Approve Booking Requests” option is enabled, there are two choices;

All
For these email addresses / domains

The “All” option retains the previous auto-approve behavior. If selected, then all incoming booking requests will automatically be approved by MIDAS (subject to availability).

The “For these email addresses / domains” option allows you to instruct MIDAS to auto-approve requests from certain email addresses or domains. This setting will take a comma separated list of email domains or individual email addresses.

If a person makes a booking requests under an email address which matches this setting, their request will be auto-approved by MIDAS.

If a booking request is made from under an email address which doesn’t match this setting, then venue managers will be notified and would need to manually review the request.

This powerful new auto-approve option can have some real benefits!

For instance, you could set anyone “internal” to your organization to have their booking requests auto-approved, whilst still requiring external requestors to have their requests manually approved.

How To Get MIDAS v4.27…

MIDAS v4.27 isn’t yet publicly available. It is expected to be made available to Beta Testers soon, with a full public release shortly after. In the meantime, why not check out some of the new features that were included in v4.26 ?

Tags: public booking requests, v4.27, web requests

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Print Individual Bookings

3 minute read time · Updated March 12, 2024

Many of our users require the ability to be able to print out bookings from their MIDAS system. Perhaps they have staff or volunteers who don’t have access the a computer, and therefore need a “paper copy” of bookings.

There are a number of ways this is facilitated in MIDAS.

Firstly, you can quickly print bookings for the currently viewed date (or date range) in the booking grid. This is achieved by simply clicking the “Print” icon in the MIDAS toolbar.

Furthermore, you can also right-click this icon to generate more advanced printouts.

MIDAS also allows you to print any individual client’s past or future bookings, or those over a specific date range.

We know that these extensive print capabilities within our software are extremely valuable to our users. However, until now there hasn’t been an easy way to print details of just a single individual booking.

Printing a single booking

This has been an often requested feature on our Feature Requests page. We’re therefore delighted to be able to introduce this for MIDAS v4.27.

Users who have been granted the “Can print” user permission, will notice the addition of a small print icon in the upper right of the Booking Information Panel:

Print the currently selected tab in the Booking Information Panel

This icon will be present whenever the Booking Information Panel has been set to retain its information. The Booking Information Panel is populated when you “hover” your mouse over a booking in the booking grid. Now, normally, this information then disappears from the Panel when you move away from a booking. However, the small small “Pin” icon in the top-right corner of the Panel retains this last selected booking’s details. When set to retain information, the new Print icon will be displayed.

When this new small print icon is clicked, a window will open displaying all the information shown in the currently selected tab of the Booking Information Panel. This information is displayed in a printer-friendly format, and your browser’s native print dialog will then be shown.

So, if the “Booking” tab is currently selected, you’ll be able to print out all the information for the displayed booking.

When the “History” tab is selected, you’ll be able to print the full edit history for the displayed booking.

And, of course, if the “Client” tab is selected, you’ll be able to print detailed client information for the displayed client.

How To Get MIDAS v4.27…

Tags: booking information, print, v4.27

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Quickly Select Common Date Ranges

2 minute read time · Updated February 1, 2021

In number of places in our scheduling software you can select a date range. For example, when printing bookings, searching for bookings, of viewing reports and statistics over a custom date range.

For MIDAS v4.27 we’re making it really quick to select common date ranges.

Previously, to select a date range in these areas, you’d be presented with two fields, each of which may be selected separately to show a popup calendar. This allowed selecting both a start date and finish date for the date range.

In v4.27 you’ll notice that we’ve now added a small “…” icon after these dates:

A new “…” icon allows fast selection of common date ranges

Clicking, or simply “hovering” your mouse over this “…” icon will show a dropdown list of common date ranges:

A number of common predefined date ranges are available in MIDAS — Quickly select a common date range in MIDAS

Selecting one of these common date ranges will automatically populate the start and finish dates respectively.

This makes it really fast to select, say, the last 7 days of bookings with just a single click!

Previously, this would take a minimum of 4 clicks! (Clicking once on the first date, clicking again to select a date from the resulting popup calendar, and then repeating this again for the second date).

How To Get MIDAS v4.27…

Tags: calendar, v4.27

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Happy Christmas from MIDAS HQ

3 minute read time · Updated January 20, 2025

We’d like to wish all our customers a very Happy Christmas from MIDAS HQ here in the UK!

2020 is a year that most will be glad to see the back of, and we know that many of our customer’s businesses have been significantly impacted by COVID-19 this year.

Since March, we’ve been working hard to support our customers affected by the pandemic. We put in place support for those venues which had to temporarily close, and provided guidance for those who’ve had to adjust their way of operating.

Sadly though we know that some of our customers this year have had to permanently shut their doors, and our hearts especially go out to them at this time of year.

Here at MIDAS HQ in the UK it’s been a challenging year too. We’ve been through two national lockdowns, and been in a perpetual local lockdown for coming up to 5 months now.

As a small and agile business though, we’ve been able to adapt and continue with business as usual.

Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve released 3 significant updates to MIDAS (v4.24, v4.25, and v4.26), packed with new and exciting features!

We’ve also maintained the high level of support that we know our customers value! During the pandemic, our median response time to Priority Support requests has been just 10 minutes! What’s more, EVERY Priority Support request we’ve received during the pandemic has had a dedicated human response within 6 hours of receipt!

Priority Support over Christmas:

As we’ve done in every year previous, Priority Support will be available to all customers with an active support subscription should they need it right across the festive season – even on Christmas Day itself!

This year, however, we would ask customers with non-urgent support queries over Christmas to consider waiting until the new year to contact our support team if at all possible.

The UK government are allowing a very small window over the festive season for people to travel and see family. Most of our staff have been in perpetual lockdown and haven’t seen close family members since before March, and so we’d like them to have the opportunity to be able to travel and do that this Christmas.

This may mean slightly slower responses times to support queries than usual, and is why we’re encouraging non-urgent queries to be delayed until the new year, where possible.

Thank you for your understanding and support!

However you’re spending this festive season, we’re sure it won’t feel like a “normal” Christmas. But we do wish you a happy and peaceful time, and we sincerely thank all our customers for their continued custom and support during 2020.

We’re already working on MIDAS v4.27, so stay tuned for more updates in 2021!

Have a safe and peaceful Christmas from all of us here at MIDAS HQ!

Tags: support

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