We are pleased to announce the availability of MIDAS v4.04!
Read on to find out about the new features and improvements we’ve made in the latest update to our powerful room scheduling software.
Venue-Specific Resources
In v4.04, we’ve introduced “venue-specific” resources! Previously, any resources you added to MIDAS would then be available globally across all of your venues. Now, you can specify your resources (equipment, consumables, and staffing) to only be available to specific venues. So, for instance, if you schedule a mixture of both sports facilities and classrooms, and you have “Football Nets” defined as a resource, you can now restrict this resource to only be available to say your “Sports Hall” and “All Weather Pitch”, but not available for classrooms!
New Web Request Settings
The “Public Booking Request” (web request) is a standard feature of our web based scheduling software. It allows non-users (i.e. visitors to your website/members of the public) to check your venue’s availability and make booking requests. This feature of our scheduling software is one of the most popular. Therefore, based on customer feedback, we’ve implemented three new settings in v4.04….
Show Hours of Operation
By default, your venue’s operating hours are not revealed on your Public Booking Request screen. This setting will show a visual representation of each venue’s hours of operation (similar to that shown to logged in users). NOTE: Whether this setting is enabled or not, requesters will still not be able to make booking requests outside of your operating hours. This setting merely provides a visual indication to requesters of when your venues are closed.
Show Venue Capacities
On the initial screen of the Public Booking Request process, each of your publicly requestable venues are listed. The capacity (maximum occupancy) of each is also usually indicated. In some cases it may be desirable to hide the capacity information on this screen – especially if you don’t use MIDAS primarily to schedule venues. For instance, some customers use MIDAS, and the Public Booking Request features, to allow staff to schedule support technicians or their own annual leave. This new setting removes information on your venue capacities from your Public Booking Request screens.
Auto-Approve Booking Requests
If enabled, this new setting will automatically approve and convert all received booking “requests” into actual confirmed bookings (availability permitting). This setting is ideal if you’d like members of the public to be able to schedule their own appointments without first requiring approval from a MIDAS administrator.
Sort Booking Requests
With v4.04, you can now quickly sort received booking requests by either the date/time that the booking request was made, or the date/time that the requested booking starts. Sorting can be in either ascending or descending order, by simply clicking the corresponding heading. In earlier versions this was fixed to sort requests by booking start times in ascending order.
New URL Custom Booking Field Type
MIDAS already allows you to add your own custom booking fields. These custom fields can either be single-line text, multi-line text, numeric, or drop-down list.
With v4.04 we’ve added a new custom booking field option: URL. A custom URL field allows you to associate one or more internet addresses (URLs) to your bookings, which are also “clickable” allowing users to navigate to the URL.
This could be useful – for instance – to link to the homepage of the organization that the booking is for. Or you could use a custom URL field to to a .pdf or Word document with further information about the booking, or an associated booking contract/insurance certificate… or anything you want!
Other New Settings
We’ve also added a couple of other new settings for v4.04…
Account for Pending Booking Requests when checking Booking Availability
By default, when making bookings, MIDAS doesn’t take into account any outstanding Pending Booking Requests when checking Booking Availability. For example, if a booking request is currently “pending” for Room 1 on Monday from 9am-10am, whilst it remains “pending”, other actual bookings can still be made for this venue/time slot.
To prevent any other bookings being made in slots where “pending” bookings are still awaiting approval, select this option. MIDAS will then show “Unavailable” for subsequent bookings that would conflict with outstanding booking requests.
Enable links for phone numbers (Skype integration)
If enabled, phone/cell numbers displayed within MIDAS will become clickable (using the callto: prefix). If you have compatible software installed on your device, such as Skype, clicking these numbers within MIDAS initiate a call to the corresponding number.
Other New Features
- Quickly “duplicate” bookings by dragging them whilst holding Shift
- Ability to filter by booking type when searching for bookings
Changelog / Release Notes
The full changelog may be viewed here
Recent NEW addons
Did you know that during August we released TWO new addons for MIDAS?
With the “Web Calendars” you can seamlessly embed calendars directly into your website.
The “Digital Signage” addon is a powerful solution offering real-time display of ongoing and upcoming room bookings on TV screens around your site!
Read more about these exciting new addons here
How to get MIDAS v4.04
Existing customers with an ongoing Annual Support Subscription are entitled to a FREE update to v4.04. This may be obtained within the software via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Update.
If you’re an existing customer with a recently expired Annual Support Subscription, don’t worry – you can quickly renew your subscription to get the update to v4.04.
…and if we cloud host your MIDAS booking system, there’s no need to do anything – we’ve already automatically updated you to v4.04!
If you’re not yet using MIDAS for your organization’s scheduling, you can purchase online directly through our website.
