Posts Tagged: scheduled tasks

Schedule regular Security Audits

You may not know, but MIDAS includes a built-in “Security Audit” tool.

This allows you to perform a quick and on-demand security analysis of your MIDAS system.

Perform a detailed Security Audit of your MIDAS room booking system
Perform a detailed Security Audit of your MIDAS room booking system

First introduced with the release of MIDAS v4.13 in 2016, the “Security Audit” tool tests a number of key metrics of your MIDAS booking system.

The audit checks your MySQL / MariaDB setup, MIDAS files, and recommended MIDAS security settings.

It provides a detailed report with appropriate advisories for hardening the security of your MIDAS system.

When the Security Audit was first introduced, it analyzed 15 metrics. Today, that number has increased to over 20.

For MIDAS v4.33, the audit now additionally also…

  • Indicates the number of recently failed login attempts to your MIDAS system.
  • Checks whether Geofenced logins have been enabled.

But the biggest improvement to Security Audits for MIDAS v4.33 is the ability to schedule regular automated security audits.

Until now, a Security Audit could only be manually initiated (via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Security → Perform a Security Audit)

From MIDAS v4.33, you can now use Scheduled Tasks to automatically run a Security Audit and email you the results. Audits can be configured to run every 7, 14, 30, 60, or 90 days.

Schedule automated security audits of your MIDAS booking system
Schedule automated security audits of your MIDAS booking system

New Scheduled Tasks

Introducing Scheduled Tasks…

Scheduled Tasks
Scheduled Tasks

In MIDAS v4.07, we’ve introduced a new “Scheduled Tasks” feature. This may be accessed MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS & Scheduled Tasks.

“Scheduled Tasks” allow the software to perform a series of automated tasks in the background without any user intervention. These automated tasks include:

  • Sending booking reminders to clients in advance of their upcoming bookings
  • Sending invoice reminders to clients in advance of the due date of their invoice, if their invoice hasn’t been paid in full
  • Sending invoice overdue notifications to clients who haven’t paid their invoices on time

Each “task” can be configured. For example, you can specify how many hours before a booking commences a reminder should be sent to the client, or how many days before/after an invoice is due a reminder/notification should be sent.

Reminders/Notifications are sent via email to clients who have been set to receive them. You can control which reminders/notifications each client receives by modifying the “e-mail reminders” setting of their client record. Additionally, clients themselves have the ability to “opt out” of receiving further email notifications from your MIDAS.

We’ll also be giving you the ability to customize the content of these email notifications/reminders. We’ll cover this in more depth in another blog post!

Set Email Reminders for Clients

In the meantime, if your MIDAS system in “self hosted”, in order to use the new “Scheduled Tasks” features of v4.07, you’ll first need to configure your server to execute a MIDAS component once every hour. For more information, please refer to the following knowledgebase article: Configuring your server to run Scheduled Tasks.

If your MIDAS is “cloud hosted” by us, there’s no need to do this. Scheduled Tasks will work “out of the box” for our cloud hosted customers.