Posts Tagged: integration

Control heating automatically with MIDAS

We’re excited to announce that you can now integrate your room and building heating controls with MIDAS.

Inspire Home Automation are a UK based business who design, develop and sell smart heating controls.

In conjunction with Inspire Home Automation’s Smart Thermostats, spaces can be heated according to when bookings are due to take place in them.

Benefits of a calendar based thermostat

There are a range of benefits to automatic scheduled temperature control based on a calendar of bookings. Most notably, it can help:

  • Reduce heating costs by only heating rooms and spaces when they are in use.
  • Reduce administration and staffing costs – no need to get somebody in before a booking to switch the heating on and ensure it’s turned off again afterwards.
Room Booking System using Inspire Smart Thermostats
Inspire Smart Thermostat

Fully Configurable

Inspire Smart Thermostats with MIDAS calendar integration are fully configurable.

For example, you can setup your heating schedule to automatically switch on one hour before a booking, and then automatically switch off, or turn the temperature down, at the end of the booking.

If you want greater control, and have different heating zones for different rooms, multiple Smart Thermostats can be added.

For more product information on Inspire Smart Thermostats, please visit www.inspirehomeautomation.co.uk.

How it works

There are two options for having Inspire Smart Thermostats control temperature based on your MIDAS room bookings.

Option 1: Export Bookings

Simply export bookings from your MIDAS system, and then import them into your Inspire Smart Thermostat. The Smart Thermostat then automatically controls a heating schedule based upon the booking calendar you import.

Option 2: Sync Bookings

For fully automated temperature control, Inspire Smart Thermostats can read an updating Data Feed of bookings from your MIDAS system.

This avoids the need to manually export bookings from your MIDAS system and then manually import them into your smart thermostat each time bookings change in your MIDAS system.

Instead, the Smart Thermostat automatically pulls an updated schedule from the Data Feed every 24 hours, so that any changes to bookings since the last check can be automatically captured.

Need an updated booking to be pushed to the Smart Thermostat schedule quicker? No problem, Inspire Smart Thermostats also have the option to refresh a Data Feed on demand.

Setting Up

Please see our How to setup automated heating control with Inspire Smart Thermostats Knowledge Base article for full details of how to configure MIDAS with Inspire thermostats.

Availability

Basic Inspire Thermostat integration (Option 1 above) is included as standard in both cloud hosted and self hosted editions of MIDAS room booking software.

Automated calendar sync functionality (Option 2 above) is available through our optional “Data Feeds” addon.


Latest Addon: PRTG Sensors

PRTG Network MonitorWe have an ever growing range of optional “addons” available to extend the capabilities of our MIDAS room booking and resource scheduling software.

Our latest addon, available for MIDAS v4.11 (or later) allows system/network administrators to monitor – in “real time” – key parameters and metrics of a self-hosted or cloud-hosted MIDAS system in PRTG Network Monitor.

PRTG is a leading professional network monitoring software solution, trusted by over 150,000 network/IT administrators worldwide to provide unified monitoring of the performance and reliability of their entire networks, infrastructure and applications.
In fact, we also use PRTG here at MIDAS for 24/7 monitoring of our global infrastructure.

 

Real-time MIDAS monitoring in PRTG Network MonitorWith our new PRTG Sensors Addon, a system or network administrator can keep track on the number of users currently logged into a MIDAS system, the number of failed login attempts, the size of database, the number of visitors on your premises right now, the number of bookings taking place today, and much much more! – in fact, there’s 18 different parameters/metrics that can be monitored all in real time!

For more information on our optional PRTG Sensors addon for MIDAS, please visit mid.as/prtg.

New customers can purchase our MIDAS web-based Room Booking and Resource Scheduling system along with the optional PRTG Sensors addon securely at mid.as/pricing.

Existing customers running MIDAS v4.11 or later can add this optional addon to their MIDAS system right now by visiting mid.as/upgrade.

Be sure to also check out some of our other exciting addons at mid.as/addons.


New Addon: Slack Integration

SlackSlack is a versatile and increasingly popular team messaging platform, offering real-time communication and collaboration with your colleagues via the web as well as mobile platforms.

Slack already integrates with a vast range of tools and services you use every day to keep all your communication in one central place, but we are pleased to announce that our web based room booking and resource scheduling software, MIDAS is the very first room booking system to offer integration with Slack though our new optional addon!

Available for MIDAS v4.09+, our Slack addon allows “Watch” notifications from your MIDAS system to be posted in real-time to your team’s Slack feed..

Slack Stream

For example, you could setup Watch notifications to automatically post to your Slack stream whenever new bookings are added, or when certain bookings are cancelled, or whenever refreshments are added to bookings, or when you’re running low on consumables!