New Custom “Range” (Slider) Booking Field

2 minute read time · Updated February 14, 2025

MIDAS Room Booking & Resource Scheduling systems come with a set of basic booking fields enabled by default. These allow you to record the type of booking, the number of attendees, any resources, and booking notes. That’s in addition of course to the room (venue), date/time, and client details.

Booking fields can be re-ordered as well as made optional or required. They can also be selectively hidden from certain users.

Furthermore, MIDAS gives you even more flexible control by allowing you to add your own “custom” booking fields as well!

A variety of different custom booking field types may be added to MIDAS, including:

Expanding the ‘range’ of custom field types

MIDAS v4.16 expands upon this range with the inclusion of a new “Range” (or “slider”) custom booking field type:

Custom Range/Slider Booking Field
Custom Range (Slider) Booking Field

When adding a new “Range” custom booking field to MIDAS, you’ll be able to configure the minimum and maximum limits of the “slider”. You can also control the number of increments (or “steps”), as well as specify a default value for the slider.

Then when users add or modify bookings, they’ll be able to adjust the slider to the desired value. That value will then be saved along with the booking.

We’re sure that the addition of the new “Range” custom booking field will find a variety of applications within customer’s MIDAS systems.

For example, a “Range” slider could be used to record the desired room temperature for each booking, which your site’s caretaker/facilities manager could use to program heating/cooling/HVAC systems accordingly.

Furthermore, our optional API could even be used to interface MIDAS directly with your building’s environmental control systems – meaning users could set room temperatures directly from within MIDAS itself! – There are so many possibilities!

Click here to continue reading about some of the other new & improved features coming in MIDAS v4.16!

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MIDAS v4.15 Out Now!

2 minute read time · Updated January 19, 2023

With Easter over for another year (and with what seems like enough chocolate to keep us going until the next!), we’re excited to announce the availability of MIDAS v4.15, our powerful web based room booking and resource scheduling software.

Here’s What’s New & Improved in v4.15

How To Get MIDAS v4.15…

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. In fact, with the affects of “Brexit”, our international prices are some 13% lower right now than they were 12 months ago – so there’s never been a better time to buy!

“Self Hosted” Customers:

Self-Hosted customers with ongoing Annual Support Subscriptions will be able to update to v4.15 in the next few 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 have already been automatically updated to the latest version of MIDAS over Easter!

If you have any questions about MIDAS, why not drop us an email, or reach out to us through social media – We’d love to hear from you!

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World Backup Day 2017 – Time to check your important data

3 minute read time · Updated August 27, 2024

World Backup Day 2017Today marks the annual World Backup Day, an event designed to raise awareness of the importance of keeping your critical files and data regularly backed-up.

We strongly believe in the importance of regularly backing-up data you can’t afford to loose. With that in mind, we built in a number of backup features to our world class web-based room booking and resource scheduling software, MIDAS.

In the background, MIDAS makes a complete and automated backup of its own database and settings upon the first successful login each and every day. These compressed database backups are then stored on the server where your MIDAS resides. Typically, compressed backups are each less than 1MB in size. They’re then stored on the server for a period of time you specify, typically up to 30 days.

To further protect your data, these automated daily backups can optionally also be emailed to a specified email address each day. This allows you to retain your own “off-site” copy of your database too!

In addition to the automated backups that MIDAS makes, our scheduling software also provides the ability to manually generate instant backups at any time. This can be achieved via a simple one-click “Backup Now” button. You’ll find this button via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Database → Backup Now.

Database backups (whether generated manually or automatically) can be easily and readily restored at any time. You can choose to restore either partially or in full via a simple user interface. This can be found via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Database → Restore. So, should you ever wish to “roll back” your MIDAS system to an earlier point in time, or if you suffer a massive server failure and loose data, you can quickly get your MIDAS system back up and running!

Backup and Restore in MIDAS
Easily Backup and Restore Data with MIDAS software

For more information on the powerful backup/restore features of MIDAS, please see mid.as/help/manage-database-settings

For our cloud hosted customers we also take complete database backups daily. These backups are then stored off-site at two separate locations for a period of six months.

Even More Backup Options

What’s more, we also offer an optional “Emergency Access” addon to our hosted customers. This optional addon allows cloud-hosted customers to access a “real-time” backup of their MIDAS system in event that they’re ever unable to access their primary MIDAS system. These backups run on different servers, in different data centers, via different ISPs to our Primary Servers.

So, as you can see from all the above features and procedures we’ve built into our software, that we take data backups very seriously! We make it easy to ensure your important MIDAS data can easily be backed up and restored with minimal fuss!

But on World Backup Day today, whilst your MIDAS data is taken care of, why not take a moment to backup your own important personal files? Your family photos, home videos, documents and emails are important! Could you stand loosing them? Whilst it may seem tedious and time consuming, you’ll be glad you did should anything ever happen to the originals!

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New Public “Book Online” feature

3 minute read time · Updated February 8, 2025

With MIDAS v4.15 just around the corner, we’re offering a “first look” at some of the highlights coming in the next update to our web based room booking and resource scheduling software.

From the very outset MIDAS has included an ability to allow non-users to check availability of your facilities and submit booking “requests” online. “Non users” are visitors to your website, members of the public, etc.

These booking “requests” then go into a pending booking requests queue. Administrative users can quickly approve or reject each request. Approved booking requests then become “confirmed” bookings.

You can find out more about how this works in our “Accept Booking Requests Online” video tutorial.

We know that our customers love this long-standing feature of MIDAS. Put simply, it makes their lives significantly easier. That’s because it allows people to check room availability themselves, without having to phone/email/speak to an administrator.

We also know that some of our customers would like the Public Booking Request features to go one step further. You’d like to allow non-users to check availability, book and pay for their booking instantly there and then (rather than having to be invoiced for their booking at a later date)

That’s why in addition to the “Web Request” features of MIDAS, for v4.15 we’re also introducing a “Web Booking” feature.

The “Web Booking” process is very similar to the traditional “Web Request” process. The difference being the addition of a payment step, allowing the individual to pay to confirm their booking.

Here’s How It Works:

  1. A person selects the date(s)/time(s) they wish to book, and MIDAS checks their availability.
  2. If available, the person can enter more details about their booking and continue to the payment page.
  3. At this point, the booking is temporarily added as a “tentative” booking until the person completes payment. At this point the tentative booking automatically becomes a “confirmed” booking.

If the person fails to complete their payment in a timely manner, the temporary tentative booking will automatically expire, and the person would need to re-start the booking process. By default, this time frame is set to 15 minutes, but can be changed by an administrator.

As per the native invoice payment methods offered within MIDAS, both PayPal (with IPN correctly configured) and Stripe are available for Web Booking payments. Stripe however is recommended over PayPal.

The “Web Request” and “Web Booking” features share a set of common settings. So we’ve redesigned the previously named “Web Request” tab on the Manage MIDAS screen to become the “Public Settings” tab:

New Public Settings
New Public Settings

As you can probably tell from the above screenshot, the new auto-venue selection option we unveiled earlier this month, will also be available for “Web Booking”.

The combination of new auto-venue selection and Web Bookings helps make MIDAS even more suited for hotels, B&B’s, hostels, and other overnight accommodation businesses. Your customers will now be able to truly “book online”!

You may like to check out some of the other features of MIDAS v4.15 too!

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