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Other new features in v4.27

Filed Under: Development by midas — Leave a comment

February 17, 2021

In previous blog posts we’ve covered a number of new features coming in MIDAS v4.27. These include quickly selecting common date ranges, printing individual bookings, and auto-approve improvements for booking requests.

In this post we’ll brief touch on some of the other new features we’re introducing in v4.27.

Search results can now be easily printed

The “Print” icon in the MIDAS toolbar is really flexible! When viewing the Booking Grid, clicking the Print icon allows you to print bookings for the currently viewed date (or date range).

Furthermore, right-clicking the Print icon show advance print options allowing you to further customize booking print outs.

But that’s not all, the Print icon also allows printing in other areas of MIDAS. For example, when viewing reports/statistics, the Print icon will print the current report.

For v4.27 we’ve further extended the Print icon’s functionality in relation to search results.

When performing a search (via the “Search” toolbar icon), the Print icon can now be used to send the search results to your printer.

The Recent Activity audit log can now be exported to Excel

The “Recent Activity” feature in MIDAS allows administrators to view an audit log of all recent user activity within your booking system. This includes log ins and outs as well as bookings added, modified, and deleted.

Each entry in the Recent Activity log is timestamped with the user who performed each action, as well as their IP address.

This allows a full audit trail to be maintained for actions taking place in your MIDAS system.

For v4.27, we’ve added an “Export” button to the Recent Activity log. This allows you to easily export the log to Excel.

Exported client data now includes current credit and tax exempt status

Whilst we’re on the subject of exporting data from your MIDAS system; Exporting client data (MIDAS Admin Options → Export → Clients) in v4.27+ will now also include each client’s current credit and tax exempt status.

Note: This information will only be included in exported client data if the user performing the export has been granted the “Can use invoicing” permission.

Improved booking import support

As you may be aware, MIDAS allows you to import bookings from 3rd party software.

When importing bookings, MIDAS needs to know the date format used in the data you’re importing.

Every 3rd party application stores/exports dates differently, and so we strive to support as many different date formats as possible.

Currently supported import date formats are:

DD.MM.YYYY (Example: 23/07/2021)
DD.MM.YY (Example: 23/07/21)
MM.DD.YYYY (Example: 07/23/2021)
MM.DD.YY (Example: 07/23/21)
YYYY.MM.DD (Example: 2021/07/23)
YYYY.DD.MM (Example: 2021/23/07)
YY.MM.DD (Example: 21/23/07)
YY.DD.MM (Example: 21/07/23)
DD.MM.YYYY HH.MI (Example: 23/07/2021 16:30)
MM.DD.YYYY HH.MI (Example: 07/23/2021 16:30)
HH.MI.SS – Day DD Month YYYY (Example: 16:30:00 – Friday 23 July 2021)
HH.MI-HH:MI, Day DD Month YYYY (Example: 16:30-17:30, Friday 23 July 2021)
Day DD Month YYYY HH.MI – Day DD Month YYYY HH.MI (Example: Friday 23 July 2021 16:30 – Friday 23 July 2021 17:30)

For MIDAS v4.27, we’re adding support for a couple more date formats:

DD.Mon.YYYY (Example: 23-Jul-2021)
DD.Mon.YY (Example: 23-Jul-21)

This extensive range of supported date formats for your raw booking data should cover the formats used by most 3rd party applications.

If you have booking data that you wish to import that doesn’t conform to one of the above date formats, please let us know and we’ll try and add support in a future update.

Advanced filter improvements

When advanced printing or when generating invoices, MIDAS offers an advanced “filter” option. This allows you to include/exclude bookings from your printout/generated invoice(s).

For v4.27 we’ve imported these advanced filters to now allow blank (empty) search terms.

This improvement now allows you to include/exclude bookings where a certain booking field is blank, which previously you couldn’t do.

We’ve also further improved the advanced print filter to allow filtering of bookings by invoice.

This allows you to now generate a printout of bookings which match, partially match, or don’t match a particular invoice number.

Custom logo improvements for cloud hosted customers

MIDAS allows you to “co brand” the software by uploading your own logo. This logo then appears throughout the software. For example, it is included on the login screen for your MIDAS system. It can also then be included in various templates in MIDAS – including email and invoicing templates.

Your logo may be added/changed via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Appearance → Logo.

Our cloud hosted customers may notice that when changing their logo, the changes are not immediately visible. This is due to the way our network “caches” static content, like logos. Sometimes it can take up to 24 hours to a logo change to be visible.

We’re improving this for MIDAS v4.27. Now, when our cloud hosted customers change their logo, their new logo should be visible right away!

How To Get MIDAS v4.27…

“Self Hosted” Customers:

Self-Hosted customers with active Support Subscriptions will shortly be able to update to v4.27. It only takes a couple of clicks – simply log in to your MIDAS system and go to MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Update.

If no update is available, please check back again in a few days time, as we are staggering updates for self-hosted customers over the next few weeks.

“Cloud Hosted” Customers:

Cloud-Hosted customers don’t need to do anything! – All our active Cloud-Hosted MIDAS customers will shortly be automatically updated to this latest version of MIDAS.

Tags: activity tracking, export, import, print, search, v4.27

User Management Improvements

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June 4, 2020

For v4.25, we’ve made a some improvements to user management. These include..

New “Can Search” Permission

We’ve added a new “Can Search” user permission allowing administrators to control which users can access the Search features within MIDAS.

New “Can Import / Export” Permission

We’ve also added a new “Can Import / Export” user permission allowing administrators to control which users can import and/or export data. As well as simple Yes/No options, this setting also includes “Export Only” and “Import Only” options too.

Re-Show The Quick Tour Upon A User’s Next Login

Re-enable the Quick Tour option on any user account. The next time the user logs in, they’ll be presented with the option of a quick tour of the user interface. For more information please see this post.

Support For Users On Unstable Connections

One of the security features we built into MIDAS automatically logs out a user’s session if it detects their IP address has changed. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, we found many more users were working remotely from home. Often their home internet connections were unstable, or their ISPs were under heavy load as a result of increased demand. Consequently, some users were finding that their IP address was frequently changing. In some cases, this was happening every couple of minutes! Due to the security restrictions we built into our software, this meant they were being frequently logged out of their MIDAS system.

So for v4.25, we’ve introduced a new “User is on an unstable connection” setting. With this setting enabled on a give user account, MIDAS will ignore any IP address changes whilst the user is logged in. This means that even if their IP address changes, they will remain logged into MIDAS.

This setting, disabled by default, should only be temporarily enabled for users who are experiencing frequent log outs due to a fluctuating IP address.

Optionally Add New Users As Clients

Whenever an administrator adds a new user to their MIDAS system, a corresponding entry is automatically made in the client database for the individual. This is because it is generally assumed that there will be instances when a user adds a booking for themselves.

However, following customer feedback, we’ve now made automatically adding a new user as a client optional. Now, when a new user is added, an “Also add user as a client” box is shown. If this box is unselected, the new user will be added without an associated entry made in the client database.

Easily Toggle “View Access” settings

The “View Access” options allows an administrator to control which venue groups (and therefore venues) a user has access to. By default users have access to all venue groups, but there may be instances when you wish to restrict this. If you have a long list of venue groups, it can be tedious to manually check/uncheck lots of groups. As such we’ve added a way to “toggle” all currently selected groups. Simply click/tap on the “View Access” label, and all checked groups will become unchecked, and vice versa.

Easily toggle View Access options — Easily toggle selected “View Access” options for a user by clicking/tapping “View Access”

These are just a few of the new and improved features for MIDAS v4.25. Please see this post for details of other new features you’ll find in v4.25.

You can also ask questions and discuss the new features of v4.25 over on Reddit.

Tags: export, import, user permissions, v4.25

Improvements in Importing Data

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June 20, 2017

We’ve made a number of improvements for the upcoming v4.16 release of our MIDAS software when it comes to importing data from 3rd party calendars/booking systems, namely:

1) Faster importing of CSV data

We’ve managed to significantly improve the import speed of CSV data, which in previous versions could become very slow/sluggish depending upon a combination of settings in MIDAS and the amount of data being imported

2) Improved CSV support

MIDAS v4.16 now better handles instances where CSV data fields themselves contained a record delimiting character.

For example, take the following CSV (Comma Separated Values) line:

Item 1,Item 2,Item 3,"Item 4a, Item 4b",Item 5

Previously MIDAS would incorrectly analyze the 4th item as being two separate data items, “Item 4a” and “Item 4b”, instead of a single data record.

This behavior is now corrected when importing data into MIDAS v4.16.

3) Support for importing bookings with resources

Until now, whilst you could import bookings into MIDAS, it was not possible to “map” data – including resources – to the resources database within MIDAS.

We’ve addressed this for v4.16 and you can import resources along within your booking data.

To be able to import resources along with your bookings, you’ll need to ensure that your resource data falls within a single “column” in your CSV data file. MIDAS will then parse this data and attempt to determine the applicable resource and quantity.

For example, if you wish to import a booking which has two laptops and one data projector assigned to it, your CSV data field for this should be in one of the following supported formats:

“2 Laptop, 1 Projector”
“2 Laptop; 1 Projector”
“x2 Laptop, x1 Projector”
“x2 Laptop; x1 Projector”
“2x Laptop, 1x Projector”
“2x Laptop; 1x Projector”
“2No. Laptop, 1No. Projector”
“2No. Laptop; 1No. Projector”

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

Tags: import, v4.16

New Tool: Import Client Data into MIDAS

Filed Under: News, Tips and Tricks by midas — Leave a comment

February 20, 2012

One of the things we frequently get asked by our customers is; “Is there a way to import my existing data into MIDAS?”. Well, we’ve listened to you, and have now released an easy-to-use import tool to allow you to do just that!

Using our free import tool, you can import client data into MIDAS v3.00 or later, that is either in a .csv (Comma Separated Values), or a .txt (Tab, or other character, Delimited) file format.

This means that provided your 3rd party application allows you to export client/contact data in one of these formats, you can easily import it directly into MIDAS!

You can also use our import tool to import data directly from a spreadsheet application, such as Microsoft’s Excel!

We’ve even given you the option to replace, or simply add to your existing client data when importing new data!

Here’s a few screenshots of the new import tool: