We love giving customers flexibility over how they charge clients for use of their rooms and spaces.
MIDAS already allows specifying different “room rates” for different days of the week, and for different lengths and types of bookings. In addition, venues can be charged “per booking”, “per hour” or “per day”.
For more information on setting venue rates, please see our short video tutorial:
How to set venue rates
For our upcoming v4.19 release, we’re introducing a new “per person” venue rate:
Per Person Venue Rate
When a venue rate is set to “per person”, the charge for hire of the venue will be determined by the number of attendees for the given booking.
For example, suppose you set a “per person” venue rate of $5, and you then add a booking with 10 attendees. The total charge for hire of that venue would be 10 x $5 = $50.
You’ll still also be able to setup different rate types for different lengths of bookings too. For instance, this would allow you to charge a reduced rate for lengthier bookings.
Click here to continue reading about some of the other new & improved features coming in MIDAS v4.19!
To explain what a CDN does, imagine viewing a photograph online. That image will be stored on a web server somewhere. Say you’re in the UK and the server where the image resides is located in Australia. It will take your browser longer to establish a connection and retrieve the image from the other side of the world than if the server was located in the same country as you. Now, we may only be talking of a few fractions of a second longer, but if you’re viewing a web page containing several photographs, that can soon add up!
A Content Delivery Network vastly improves performance. It achieves this by storing (or “caching”) a copy of the original photograph on multiple servers all around the world. Then, when a viewer requests the photograph, the CDN serves a cached copy from whichever server is geographically closest to the viewer. This greatly improves the load time for the viewer. It also reduces the load on the original server, as the photograph is served from the CDN “cache” instead.
As a CDN “caches” a source file/web page, it is only suitable for “static” content which doesn’t change frequently, for example, images, JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets, downloads, etc). “Dynamic” content – content which changes frequently/upon each visit – must still be served directly from the origin server, rather than via the CDN.
CDN Support in MIDAS
In MIDAS v4.18 we unofficially introduced support for serving static resources from a CDN (Cloudflare). This has been automatically enabled for all MIDAS trials and for all new cloud-hosted customers since the start of April. Since then, we’ve been closely monitoring its impact and effectiveness.
Cloudflare Content Delivery Network (CDN)
As our CDN trials proved effective and exceeded our expectations, throughout May we’ve been engaged in a phased roll-out of the CDN for remaining cloud-hosted customers. We’re pleased to announce that all cloud-hosted MIDAS systems now have CDN support enabled.
We’re currently seeing nearly 90% of all requests for static resources being served directly from Cloudflare’s global CDN network. This has led to performance improvements and reduction in load times of customer’s hosted MIDAS systems of between 13% – 67%!
We’re sure you’ll appreciate these performance improvements. They’re part of our ongoing commitment to provide the best possible service for our customers! …and we’ve more improvements and enhancements in the pipeline too!
Throughout May we’ve been migrating our domain’s security certificates. We’ve transitioned from certificates issued by GlobalSign to ones issued by Let’s Encrypt instead.
What Is A Security Certificate?
In essence, a security certificate is what allows you to connect to a website over a secure https connection (instead of traditional, insecure, http). A valid and strong security certificate is what ensures that the connection and traffic between your web browser and the website/service you’re using is encrypted.
What Is A Certificate Authority?
Put simply, a “Certificate Authority” (or CA for short) is an organization responsible for issuing and revoking security certificates. Popular CA’s include Comodo, Symantec, GoDaddy, and GlobalSign to name but a few.
Which Domains Are Affected?
All mid.as domains and *.mid.as sub domains (including our cloud-hosted customer’s domains).
Why Is This Happening?
Our security certificates were due for renewal in June. As part of our continuous commitment to provide visitors to our site and customers alike with the best possible experience, we took the opportunity to review who provides our security certificates. Let’s Encrypt provide HTTPS certificates to over 70 million domains. Switching to certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt allows us to simplify and automate the management of security certificates across our expanding MIDAS network.
Will I Notice Anything Different?
In short, no!
In order to migrate our CA from GlobalSign to Let’s Encrypt, we needed to remove the previous GlobalSign (AlphaSSL) certificate from each *.mid.as domain and install a new Let’s Encrypt certificate in its place. We have being doing this in a phased transition for all *.mid.as domains during the course of May. We’re pleased to report that this transition to Let’s Encrypt is now fully completed.
Here’s how the old and new certificate issuers now look for our *.mid.as domains:
Migrating to Let’s Encrypt
We’d also like to reassure hosted customers that no domains, URLs, or IP addresses have changed as a result of this CA migration.
If you experience any issues or have any concerns, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us and we’ll be happy to help!
A note for cloud-hosted API users
Whilst unlikely, you may initially receive a certificate warning/error when making API calls. This will depend upon your code and development platform/language. Now that the security certificate for your dedicated *.mid.as sub domain has changed, it may temporarily prevent your code/app from working until you accept the new security certificate.
Also, in some rare cases, you may not be able to access the API if your platform/device is listed as incompatible in Let’s Encrypt’s certificate compatibility list.
Finally, please be aware that Let’s Encrypt issues auto-renewing certificates which are valid for fixed periods of 90 days.
Over the past few months we’ve been busy working on the next update to our Web Based Room Booking and Resource Scheduling software MIDAS, and we’re very excited to announce that this latest update (v4.18) is now available!
As you’ve come to expect from our regular releases, this latest update includes a variety of new and improved features, many of which are based on direct customer feedback!
Improved: Deleting bookings via the grid now highlights booking whilst delete confirmation dialog is shown
Improved: Watch notification text now distinguishes between bookings added and booking requests approved
Improved: Manage Addons page now cached for a short while to improve frequent successive page loads
Improved: Logging of imports, merges, and database clean-ups to the Recent Activity Log
Improved: Security Audit checks for left over installation/test files
Fixed: Cumulative roll-up of various fixes for issues discovered since v4.17 – see https://bugs.mid.as for details
How To Get MIDAS v4.18…
New To MIDAS?
We are committed to fair and accessible pricing for all organizations regardless of size. We’re totally upfront and transparent about our pricing structure, and you can purchase MIDAS v4.18 securely through our website and be up and running in no time!
“Self Hosted” Customers:
Self-Hosted customers with ongoing Annual Support Subscriptions will be able to update to v4.18 in the coming days. It only takes a couple of clicks – simply log in to your MIDAS system and go to MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Update
“Cloud Hosted” Customers:
Cloud-Hosted customers don’t need to do anything! – All our active Cloud-Hosted MIDAS customers were automatically updated to this latest version of MIDAS over Easter!
We hope you’ll enjoy all the new and improved features that MIDAS v4.18 has to offer!
In other news…
MIDAS was recently tested and reviewed by FinancesOnline.com. FinancesOnline is a respected global Business-to-Business Directory of SaaS (Software As A Service) solutions, each of which have been independently reviewed by experts. We’re delighted that FinancesOnline have awarded MIDAS both their “Great User Experience” and “Rising Star” awards!
You can read their full and independent review of MIDAS here.
About these awards… FinancesOnline recognizes software solutions that provide exceptional ease of use and an intuitive interface with its “Great User Experience” award in their appointment booking software category. Meanwhile, the “Rising Star” award certifies software products that have proven reliable and effective for users. MIDAS is also recommended in the platform’s “What is appointment scheduling software?” guide. These recognitions are complemented by the high 98 percent user satisfaction rating gathered by their Customer Satisfaction Algorithm, which aggregates the feedback and reviews of users across the web.
Throughout May we’ve been migrating our domain’s security certificates. We’ve transitioned from certificates issued by GlobalSign to ones issued by 
