In MIDAS v4.28, we’ve introduced a new “Notification Center“. In earlier versions of MIDAS, this functionality could be found within the “My Messages” screen.
As part of the new “Notification Center”, we’ve added a brand new type of “Watch” notification. “Watch” notifications allow you to be automatically notified whenever certain activity occurs within your MIDAS booking system.
For example, you may wish to be notified whenever a new booking is added to a particular venue, or when a particular type of booking is modified. You may also wish to be notified whenever certain “consumable” resources are running low.
From MIDAS v4.28 you can now create Watches for “Venue Availability”.
New Venue Availability Watch option in MIDAS v4.28
We know it can be frustrating when you go to book a room and find that it’s already been booked.
Well, wouldn’t it be great if MIDAS could automatically notify you should that timeslot become available again?
That’s exactly what Venue Availability watches allow you to do!
Simply select a currently occupied date, room, and time slot, add a new Watch, and MIDAS does the rest!
Should the unavailable time slot become available again (for instance, if the existing booking is moved or deleted), MIDAS will automatically notify you.
For MIDAS v4.28 we’ve overhauled the “My Messages” screen, and renamed it to the “Notification Center”.
All the previous functionality of “My Messages” has been retained, but we’ve given the screen itself a bit of a “facelift” to de-clutter and simplify things.
We’ve even introduced a new “Watch” option… but more on that later.
For users with the “Can use Notification Center” permission, their Notification Center may be accessed via the new “bell” icon in the MIDAS toolbar.
Here’s how the new Notification Center itself looks:
The new “Notification Center” (formally “My Messages”) in MIDAS
The Notification Center comprises three components:
Messages
Reminders
Watches
The numbers in the upper right corner of these component’s icons denoted the number of notifications currently in each section. Clicking the corresponding icon toggles the display of notifications for that particular section.
In the lower right corner of each icon, there’s a smaller icon that allows you to add/configure each section.
Messages
The “Messages” section displays internal messages you’ve received from other users in your MIDAS system. The “+” icon allows you to leave a message for another user:
Leave a message for another user
For more information on messaging another user, please see the Help Documentation.
Reminders
The “Reminders” section displays both booking and custom reminders you’ve set. To set a new booking reminder, simply select a booking in the Booking Grid, and then “Add Reminder”. To set a custom reminder, click the “+” icon near the bottom right of the “Reminders” icon in your Notification Center:
The “Watches” section displays watch notifications. These are generated when certain activity that you specify occurs within your MIDAS system. The “cog” icon adjacent to the “Watches” icon is used to configure your Watch notifications.
Configure “Watch” notifications
There are three types of Watch notification available:
Bookings
Consumables
Venue Availability
“Bookings” allows you to monitor and be alerted to new activity in certain venues, and/or for certain booking types, and/or for certain resources.
“Consumables” allows you to monitor levels of your consumable resources.
“Venue Availability” allows you to be alerted if and when a currently unavailable time slot for a given venue becomes available again. This is a brand new feature introduced for v4.28, which you can read more about in this post.
For more information on Watch notifications, please see the Help Documentation.
Notification Center Settings
You can adjust your Notification Center settings from within the Notification Center via the “cog” icon in the upper right corner.
Notification Center Settings
These settings allow you to control how and when you receive notifications from your Notification Center.
As of 4th July 2021, all our cloud-hosted customer’s MIDAS databases have been migrated across from MySQL to MariaDB.
What is MariaDB?
MariaDB is a community-developed “fork” of the popular MySQL database engine.
It was created by one of the original founders of MySQL, who forked it over concerns surrounding MySQL’s acquisition by Oracle Corporation in 2009. These concerns centered around rumors that Oracle were considering killing off MySQL to prevent competition with their own “Oracle” database. In the end, that didn’t actually happen and MySQL continues to remain available. But MariaDB continues to gain in popularity year on year, and has a number of advantages over MySQL.
Why migrate from MySQL to MariaDB?
MariaDB offers improved performance over MySQL in many scenarios.
MariaDB is community-driven, whereas MySQL is owned and developed by Oracle Corporation.
MariaDB is arguably in more active development. (MariaDB has 193,318 code commits – the latest was today, MySQL has 163,534 – the latest was 3 months ago *)
MariaDB continues to gain in popularity.
* correct at time of writing
Now, we’ve been thoroughly testing MariaDB in our MIDAS development environment for well over a year now. In fact, it’s now become our “preferred” database engine over MySQL. We now only use MySQL for testing purposes. Because we now develop primarily using MariaDB, it made sense to move cloud-hosted customers over to this database engine too.
Will I notice any difference?
Our cloud-hosted customers may notice small performance improvements when performing certain operations in their online booking system. Other than that customers shouldn’t notice any other obvious changes.
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any additional benefits to MariaDB though! One of the things we’ve now been able to do in to MariaDB is implement “data-at-rest” encryption.
Data-at-rest encryption
When it comes to encrypting data send over the internet, there are broadly two different types of encryption; encryption in transit, and encryption at rest.
Encryption in transit deals with the secure transmission of data between your browser and a server. For example, if you submit a form on a web page, the data you entered needs to be transmitted (or “sent”) to a server. If the form was on a web page severed from a URL beginning “http://”, the data is transmitted unencrypted to the sever. This means that they data you’re submitting could potentially be intercepted and read during transit.
A form submitted on a website accessed over httpS, with correctly configured security certificates, will mean than the data will be encrypted in transit to the server.
All of our cloud-hosted MIDAS systems are accessible over secure https only. We support the latest standards and protocols (including TLS 1.3), and disallow older/obsolete/insecure protocols (like SSL 2/3, and TLS 1.0/1.1). If you’re interested, you can view our A+ rating on SSL Labs.
Encryption at rest on the other hand deals with how data is actually stored on a server (i.e. on a physical disk). Data may be encrypted in transit, yet not encrypted at rest, or vice versa.
The most secure systems are those which encrypt data both in transit AND at rest.
As of 4th July 2021, we’re pleased to announce that all our cloud hosted customer’s databases are also now encrypted at rest too!
What about self-hosted customers?
This month’s migration from MySQL to MariaDB affects cloud-hosted customers only.
Self-hosted customers have a choice between either using MySQL or MariaDB for their MIDAS database.
We have no plans to discontinue support for MySQL in the foreseeable future, and will continue to provide support to customers who are using MySQL for their MIDAS booking systems.
The environment, and our combined impact upon it, is an important global issue. Every day there are new headlines highlighting the environment challenges facing our world, and ways that we can all help combat climate change and reduce our carbon footprint.
Earth Hour
Here at MIDAS you may be aware that we have previously taken part in Earth Hour and we will be taking part again this year on Saturday 27 March 2021. The aim of the campaign is to raise awareness of environmental issues and asks for both individuals and businesses alike to switch off their lights for an hour between 8.30pm – 9.30pm in their local time zone.
How MIDAS is responding
Whilst thinking about this year’s Earth Hour we have been reviewing our current environmental strategies and looking at ways in which we could further reduce our carbon footprint.
As MIDAS is an online room booking system, we’re conscious of our environmental impact. We’re also pro-active in researching ways we can reduce our impact on CO2 emissions.
As part of our research, we recently discovered the Website Carbon Calculator. The website carbon calculator uses five key metrics to estimate the carbon emissions of a website. These factors include the volume of data being transferred when a web page is viewed, the type and amount of energy used at the data center serving the web page, as well as the volume of traffic to the site.
The carbon calculator remarks that:
The average web page tested produces 1.76 grams CO2 per page view. For a website with 10,000 monthly page views, that’s 211 kg CO2 per year.
websitecarbon.com
For our own website homepage, the Carbon Calculator estimates that MIDAS is 86% cleaner than all other websites tested. It estimates that just 0.19g of CO2 is produced every time someone views our home page (1).
We also compared our website’s carbon footprint against those of other similar businesses in our sector, to see how we fare in comparison (1).
Company
Comparison against all websites tested through the carbon calculator
CO2(g) produced per view of home page
MIDAS
86% Cleaner
0.19
Roomtime
82% Cleaner
0.26
Supersaas
82% Cleaner
0.26
Skedda
75% Cleaner
0.40
Acuityscheduling
70% Cleaner
0.49
Teem
59% Cleaner
0.73
Bookinglive
52% Dirtier
1.00
Roomzilla
52% Dirtier
1.00
Getjoan
56% Dirtier
1.10
Myrendezvous
63% Dirtier
1.35
Cloudbooking
66% Dirtier
1.47
Bookitwise
68% Dirtier
1.54
Deskflex
92% Dirtier
4.45
Meetio
98% Dirtier
12.01
(1) Data correct at time of testing, and purely relates to the amount of CO2 produced per view of the homepage of each website.
As can be seen from the information produced by the website carbon calculator, there are some significant differences between some of these businesses. In some cases, viewing the home page of one of these other websites produces more than 60 times the amount of CO2 than visiting MIDAS!
Now, when choosing a room booking system, resource scheduling software, or appointment scheduler, the amount of carbon it produces probably isn’t top of your list of criteria. In fact, it may not factor in your decision making process at all!
Choosing greener online businesses
Most businesses, when focusing on reducing their carbon emissions, look to do so in “visible” ways. For instance, by reducing heating costs through better insulation, or reducing electricity costs by switching to LED light bulbs.
Reducing the amount of carbon produced by the various software products they choose is a less obvious and less “visible” action.
But when you consider the vast differences that do exist today between software vendor’s carbon production, choosing a software vendor with a low carbon footprint makes sense! Not only does it help with your own business’ green credentials, but it also – more importantly – it helps our planet.
Why choose a business that would require the equivalent of 60 trees a year to absorb the carbon it produces, when you could choose a business requiring just 2?
For a room booking and resource scheduling system committed to being green, be sure to consider MIDAS.
