They can do this without signing in or requiring a user account. These are known as the “Public” features of MIDAS.

The Public features of MIDAS comprise of two similar but distinctly different functions…

Public Web Bookings

The Public Web Bookings feature allows an individual to check room availability, book, and securely pay for their booking online.

Public Booking Requests

The Public Booking Requests feature allows an individual to check room availability and submit a booking “request” online. Once a booking request has been submitted, a “Manager” for that space can quickly approve or reject that request. Requests which are approved become confirmed bookings.

Greater control over public venue access

Now, you may not want all the spaces/rooms within your MIDAS booking system to be available for public booking/requesting.

That’s why on the Manage Venues screen, when an administrator selects a venue, there was a tick-box to make the venue “public”.

Until now, marking a venue as “Public” would apply to both public-facing Web Bookings and public-facing Booking Requests – if both features were enabled.

For MIDAS v4.41, we’ve made an improvement. You can now make each venue available for…

• Public “Booking”
• Public “Requesting”
• Both Public Booking and Public Requesting
• No Public Booking or Public Requesting

This small but significant improvement will now allow you to have some spaces directly bookable by the public. At the same time, you can have other spaces which must instead be “requested” and approved by an administrator.

This added flexibility makes it easier to balance accessibility with control – especially for venues that require approval before confirming bookings.

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As this can be done without requiring a login or a user account. When making a “public” booking/request, the person simply needs to enter their details. This will typically include their name and contact email address.

When a public web booking/request is made, MIDAS checks the email address that’s been entered against its existing client database.

If a single matching client with the same email address already exists in the client database, MIDAS will associate the booking/request with that existing client.

This negates the need for a person to have to re-enter all their information (i.e. address, phone number, etc) each time they make a web booking or request.

MIDAS can also be configured to allow individuals to update their information each time they make a web booking or request.

Multiple clients with the same email address

But what if there is more than one existing client with the same email address as the person making the web booking / request?

In these instances, MIDAS will not only compare the email address given, but also the client and organization names provided.

If there is a single exact match based on this additional information, MIDAS will associated the booking/request with the one matching client.

Again, MIDAS can be configured to update the existing client record at time of web booking / request with new details supplied by the individual.

The problem

There is however an “edge case” where the above options don’t quite go far enough.

Take for example an individual who uses their personal email address to make web bookings or requests for multiple different organizations they’re associated with.

That’s no problem if there are existing client records for the client for each of their organizations. But it becomes an issue if this is a brand new client. It’s also an issue if this is a person with just a single existing client record under one of their organizations.

Here’s an example to illustrate:

Let’s say Jeff is associated with two organizations – let’s call them “A” and “B”.

Let’s also assume that Jeff is a brand new client. There is therefore currently no client record with the same email address existing in your MIDAS system.

Jeff makes a booking request using his personal email address on behalf of organization “A”. A new client record is created for Jeff using this information.

A short while later, Jeff makes another booking request. He uses his personal email address again, but this time he’d like to make a request for organization “B”.

When Jeff makes his second request, MIDAS will see that there is already a single client in its database matching Jeff’s email address. One of two things will then happen, depending whether the “Allow client record updates” setting has been enabled in MIDAS.

If the “Allow client record updates” option is disabled, MIDAS will reuse Jeff’s original details (i.e. organization “A”). This will result in both his booking requests being for organization A.

If the “Allow client record updates” option is enabled, MIDAS will update Jeff’s original details (i.e. to become organization “B”). This will result in both his booking requests being for organization B.

…but that’s not what we want! We want his first request to be for organization A, and his second for organization B.

The solution

Instances of someone making web bookings / requests on behalf of multiple organizations using the same email address are uncommon. But we still wanted to better accommodate this scenario.

So for MIDAS v4.37 we’ve introduced a new “Account for multiple clients/organizations sharing the same email address” setting.

Enabling this setting will automatically create additional client records for each client/organization variant using the same email address.

The result – in our illustrative example above – would be that Jeff can make booking requests for either organization A or B (or even a future organization C) using his personal email address without issue.

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Once a booking request is submitted, the manager(s) of the request facility are notified. A manager can then then quickly approve or reject the booking request in MIDAS with just a few clicks.

In MIDAS v4.14 in December 2016 we introduced the option to allow a manager to “bulk” approve or reject all outstanding requests with just a single click.

This saved time in instances where there were numerous booking requests which all required approval or rejection.

To be able to bulk approve a number of booking requests, a setting was made available. This instructed MIDAS as to the order in which it should approve requests when approving them in bulk.

The “Bulk Approval Order” setting has the following options:

• Earliest Requested First – Booking requests will be approved in the order in which they were received. The earliest request received will be approved first.
• Latest Requested First – Booking requests will be approved in the reverse order in which they were received. The most recently received request will be approved first.
• Earliest Commencing First – Booking requests will be approved in the order in which the requested booking would start. Requests for the soonest start times will be approved first.
• Latest Commencing First – Booking requests will be approved in the reverse order in which the requested booking would start. Requests for the furthest away start times will be approved first.

For MIDAS v4.37 we’re giving managers even greater control when it comes to processing multiple booking requests.

In addition to be able to approve or reject one booking request at a time, or “bulk” approve/reject ALL requests at the same time, you can now also selectively approve/reject multiple requests.

On the Pending Booking Requests screen there’s now a checkbox alongside each request that’s awaiting processing.

A manager can use these tick boxes to select multiple requests and then click the “Approve Selected” or “Reject Selected” buttons at the bottom of the screen to process the selected requests accordingly.

If no requests are selected, the “Approve Selected” and “Reject Selected” buttons change. They then become the familiar “Approve All” and “Reject All” options which if used process all requests in the queue.

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By default, all booking “requests” must then be approved by a venue’s administrator (manager) before becoming a “confirmed” booking.

Back in MIDAS v4.27, we introduced an option to allow booking requests received from certain email addresses/domains to be “Auto-Approved“.

“Auto-Approved” booking requests do not require a manager’s authorization. As soon as the request is received, it’s automatically approved by MIDAS – just as if the user had made a regular “confirmed” booking.

For v4.30 we’ve extended the “Auto-Approve” options for booking requests. You can now alternatively have requests automatically approved based upon the “type” of booking request that has been made.

With this option enabled, booking requests that have had a matching booking type selected at time of requesting will be automatically approved.

All other booking requests will still require a venue manager’s approved as before.

So for example, you could configure this option so that all “internal” booking requests are automatically approved, where as all others require approval.

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When a booking request is made, “managers” for the requested venue are notified by MIDAS. They can then log in and quickly approve, reject, or modify the pending request.

The ability to have different managers for different rooms allows incoming requests to be filtered to the right department/person within your organization.

Public Booking Requesting is one of the most popular features of our software. It is a well feature widely used by our customers in their booking operations.

Auto Approval of Booking Requests

Back in October 2013 – with the release on MIDAS v4.04, we introduced the option to have all booking requests “auto approved”. With this option enabled, MIDAS would automatically approve all incoming booking requests with no manager intervention required.

Many customers don’t need this functionality, and instead prefer to manually review and approve each incoming booking request.

But for organizations such as large universities which allow students to book their own study rooms, the ability to have booking requests auto-approved is a real time saver.

Selective Auto-Approval

To extend this auto approve functionality though, we’re introducing a new option for MIDAS v4.27:

Now, if the “Auto-Approve Booking Requests” option is enabled, there are two choices;

• All
• For these email addresses / domains

The “All” option retains the previous auto-approve behavior. If selected, then all incoming booking requests will automatically be approved by MIDAS (subject to availability).

The “For these email addresses / domains” option allows you to instruct MIDAS to auto-approve requests from certain email addresses or domains. This setting will take a comma separated list of email domains or individual email addresses.

If a person makes a booking requests under an email address which matches this setting, their request will be auto-approved by MIDAS.

If a booking request is made from under an email address which doesn’t match this setting, then venue managers will be notified and would need to manually review the request.

This powerful new auto-approve option can have some real benefits!

For instance, you could set anyone “internal” to your organization to have their booking requests auto-approved, whilst still requiring external requestors to have their requests manually approved.

How To Get MIDAS v4.27…

MIDAS v4.27 isn’t yet publicly available. It is expected to be made available to Beta Testers soon, with a full public release shortly after. In the meantime, why not check out some of the new features that were included in v4.26 ?

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In this post, we’ll look at the improvements coming to “booking types”. Booking Types allow you to color-code bookings based on their “type” making them easier to spot in the booking grid. Furthermore, you can assign discounts to each booking type. This allows charging different rates depending upon the type of booking.

You can also set booking types to be “tentative“. Bookings assigned as “tentative” will automatically be removed if not confirmed in a timely manner.

This time last year, for v4.14, we introduced the ability to set a default booking type on a per-client basis. For v4.17, we’re also giving you the ability to specify a global default booking type. If set, then any bookings added without a booking type being specified, will automatically be assigned the default type. This is especially useful if you’ve “hidden” the booking type selector from view, as you can still assign bookings a default booking type.

Additionally, following customer feedback, we’re making it possible for you to limit which booking types are available for selection on the public web request/booking screens. Many organizations have “internal” booking types/classifications. They may not wish to make these available for selection by external clients. This new feature will allow this to be achieved!

You’ll find the new “Public?” and “Set as Default?” options on the Manage Booking Types screen. This may be accessed via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage Booking Types. These settings can be set independently for each of your booking types. If a booking type is set as being the default, this will be indicated by an “*” after its name in the “All Booking Types” list.

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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:

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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To make a public booking request, a requestor would go to https://your_midas_url/request. If requests have been enabled they can then select a venue (or venues), date (or dates), times, and resources, and check availability accordingly. They can then enter their details, and any additional details relating to their request and submit their request online.

For v4.15, we’re giving administrators more flexibility when it comes to the initial venue selection step of the Public Booking Request process.

Previously, a requestor would need to manually select the venue (or venues) they wish to request. However, in v4.15 an administrator can instead replace the traditional individual/manual venue selection for Public Booking Requests with automatic venue selection instead.

If the automatic venue selection option is enabled, a requestor simply selects a venue group. MIDAS will in turn automatically select a venue from within the selected group accordingly.

This is ideal if you allow public requesting of similar rooms. For example, if you have 10 identically sized/equipped meeting rooms, a requestor doesn’t necessarily care which one of these rooms their meeting takes place in. These new options would allow them to simply select that they wish to request a “Meeting Room”, and MIDAS will allocate a meeting room accordingly.

How MIDAS allocates venues when the automatic venue selection option is enabled may be configured by an administrative user….

Auto Venue Selection options include:

• Random – MIDAS will attempt to select an available venue at random from the all publicly requestable venues within the selected venue group.
• Venue Order – MIDAS will attempt to select the next available venue from the all publicly requestable venues within the selected venue group, based on the order your venues are configured to appear within MIDAS.
• Least Used (Number of Bookings) – MIDAS will attempt to select an available publicly requestable venue from the selected venue group with the least number of existing bookings in it.
• Least Used (Venue Utilization) – MIDAS will attempt to select an available publicly requestable venue from the selected venue group with the most free time in it (i.e. the least utilized venue)

These exciting new option for Public Booking Requests allow far grater flexibility, make it easier for people to make booking requests, and ensure more balanced usage of your venues!

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Clicking the “Reject All” button typically allows you to optionally enter a brief reason why you’re rejecting the requests. This reason will then be included in the rejection email notifications sent to the affected client.

If the “Approve/Reject requests silently” option is selected, clicking “Reject All” shows a confirmation of the number of booking requests to be rejected which if confirmed will then reject all those requests.

The “Approve All” button will also provide an indication of the number of booking requests to be approved. If confirmed MIDAS will then attempt to automatically approve all these requests.

Booking Approval Order

The order that these requests are automatically approved in is important. It may not be possible to automatically approve all booking requests. For example, if two requests are made by two different clients for the same venue and times, they can’t both be approved.

In such instances, a “Bulk Approval Order” setting (found via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Web Requests) determines the order (priority) in which booking requests will be bulk processed for approval. The four possible options for this setting are as follows:

1. Earliest Requested First (Requests that were made earlier will be approved before requests that were made more recently)
2. Latest Requested First (Requests that were made more recently will be approved before requests that were made earlier)
3. Earliest Commencing First (Requests for bookings starting sooner will be approved before requests that start further in the future)
4. Latest Commencing First (Requests for bookings starting further in the future will be approved before requests that are due to start sooner)

You can read more about some of the other exciting improvements coming in v4.14 here!

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The “Booking Request” features of MIDAS, allow people to submit booking “requests” which then require approval by an administrator before becoming a “confirmed” booking.

There are a number of reasons why a booking request may legitimately appear to “vanish” from the system; first of all, another administrative user may have already rejected the original booking request, or the original requestor may have changed their mind and canceled their own request.

When a person makes a booking request, MIDAS automatically send them an email notification containing details of the request they’ve submitted. These email notifications also contain a “booking request cancellation link” allowing them to cancel their request if for whatever reason they’ve changed their mind before their request is approved.

Inspecting the provided “Recent Activity Log” for the customer’s MIDAS system, there was no evidence to suggest that another user had simply rejected the missing booking requests.

There was however evidence that the booking request cancellation links, contained within the notification emails sent to original requestors had been clicked.

The customer was confident that no-one had clicked these cancellation links in their emails.

Now, the “Recent Activity Log” within MIDAS is very useful – not only does it record actions performed within a MIDAS system, it also records the user who performed the action (where applicable), the time/date the action occurred, and the IP address of the device which performed the action.

This allowed us to correlate booking request cancellation link clicks with the IP addresses from which each originated.

Interestingly, the IP addresses could all be traced back to Barracuda Networks, Inc, a company offering security products, including email security and spam filters.

So what was going on?

Once upon a time spam filters could easily detect spam email messages, as spammers tended to the same domains in their spam. As a result, spam filtering software could simply scan the content of an email message, and cross-reference any links contained within against a list of known spamming domains.

Many spam filters still behave in this way, however, in an attempt to stay one step ahead of the spammers, some spam filtering software/services – such as those provide by Barracuda Networks, Inc, go one step further and actively “click” EVERY link in every email they scan. The purpose behind this is to analyze the content and domain every link points to.

Whilst this will most likely help reduce spam further for the recipient, it can have a number of undesired consequences for users!

For example, if the recipient subscribes to any newsletters/mailing lists which contain a one-click unsubscribe link at the bottom, they will be automatically unsubscribed simply by receiving the email itself, before they even open it – let alone click the unsubscribe link!

The same thing was happening for our customer’s booking request notification emails – the booking request cancellation links were being automatically “clicked” by the spam filtering software/services which were scanning the recipient’s email.

Balancing user convenience vs aggressive mail scanners

We’ve always believed in making things as easy as possible for users – which is why we originally made canceling booking requests as simple as a “one-click” link – click once, and your request is canceled.

However, in light of these recent issues, we’re making a small change for MIDAS v4.12. Canceling a booking request will now unfortunately be a two-step process. Clicking a booking request cancellation link in a notification email will take the requestor to a web page where they will need to then click a confirm button in order to cancel their request.

The introduction of this second confirmation step, whilst less convenient for the end-user, will at least prevent aggressive mail filtering software/services which automatically “click” every link in every email, from automatically canceling booking requests without any human interaction.

The same “two-step” behavior will also be applied for links in booking/invoice reminder emails to suppress future reminders from a MIDAS system.

In the meantime, if you’re running an earlier version of MIDAS, and notice your booking requests being automatically canceled without any intervention, please check and adjust the settings in your mail scanning/filtering software. You may need to add email from your MIDAS system to an “allow list”, or prevent the automatic following of links within email.

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