In this article we’re revealing a new email notification. This notification can be configured to automatically send to your clients shortly after their bookings have concluded.

Those familiar with the extensive email notification capabilities of MIDAS will know that you can already configure MIDAS to automatically send clients a variety of notifications. These include; booking confirmations, reminders of their upcoming bookings, invoice payment reminders and more. In fact there are no fewer than 10 different email notification types available in MIDAS. Each of these may be individually customizable through the use of templates.

Send a post-booking email to your clients

For v4.24 we’re adding in an additional email notification template to the list – for “Booking Feedback”. The idea behind this is as follows. A short time after a client’s booking has taken place, MIDAS can automatically send them a courtesy follow-up email. This could simply thank them for their visit. It could also invite them to leave feedback on their room hire experience at your organization.

As with all other editable templates in MIDAS, the new “Booking Feedback” template may be modified and customized to your particular requirements. Templates are accessed and modified via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Templates. Your templates may be customized to include simple HTML code and placeholder variables.

As a side note, eagle-eyed viewers may also note from the above screenshot that we’ve also now made the Template Preview and Template Code areas vertically resizable! Previously these were both a fixed height.

Once you’ve customized your “Booking Feedback” email template, you can then enable it. You can set how long after a client’s booking has concluded MIDAS should wait before sending the email. These settings may be configured via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Scheduled Tasks.

For these post-booking emails to be automatically sent, you’ll need to have Scheduled Tasks configured on your server. If Scheduled Tasks are correctly configured, the “Last Run” time indicated in the above screenshot should show a time within the last 60 minutes. All our cloud-hosted customer’s MIDAS systems are pre-configured to run scheduled tasks. For self-hosted customers, if you’ve not yet configured Scheduled Tasks on your server, please refer to our KB article: How to configure your server to run Scheduled Tasks.

We hope our customers will appreciate this new notification and template addition to the forthcoming v4.24 update. In our next article, we’ll look at how the functionality of this new feature can be further enhanced with a brand-new optional addon. So stay tuned to our blog to discover more in the coming days!

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A growing selection of templates are available and editable within MIDAS, allowing you to customize and tailor the appearance of various parts of the software, as well as printouts and emails.

Templates are constructed using a combination of common HTML code and special MIDAS variables – don’t worry if you’re not familiar with HTML, we’re produced a handy “What is HTML and how do I use it within my MIDAS templates?” guide, complete with simple examples.

MIDAS also includes a visual WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) template editor where you can simply drag/drop/insert elements into your templates, rather than entering raw HTML code.

Since the introduction of templates, email templates in particular contained a special %CONTENT% variable. This variable would be automatically substituted for generated content when an email was sent. For example, here’s some simplified content for a Booking Confirmation email template in MIDAS v4.11:

In the above template, when a booking confirmation email is sent, the variable %CLIENT_FIRSTNAME% is automatically substituted with the forename of the client the notification is to be sent to and %DATABASE% is be substituted for the name of your MIDAS database (usually your organization’s name).

The %CONTENT% variable is then replaced with details of the client’s bookings, and would include the booking fields that had been selected via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Fields → Show In → Booking Confirmation.

Using the above template, the resulting email content may look like:

For MIDAS v4.12, we’ve overhauled email templates to give you far greater flexibility and control over the generated content of emails. The rigid %CONTENT% variable has been replaced with more useful variables. For example, a new booking confirmation email template may now look like this:

…as you can see, the original %CONTENT% variable has been replaced in v4.12 with a <bookings> … </bookings> section, in which you can add your own text and variables to customize the generated content exactly as you’d like. You can also include content from any custom booking fields you’ve added to MIDAS – for example, if you’ve created a booking field named “Test Field”, you can insert the variable %CUSTOM_TEST_FIELD% into the <bookings> … </bookings> section. (This brings email templates in line with the format of templates in our optional Digital Signage and Web Calendars addons, which have always supported <bookings> … </bookings> template sections)

We’ve also added support for a couple of new variables too; %BOOKING_COST% and %TOTAL_COST%.

%BOOKING_COST% can be added within the <bookings> … </bookings> section and will be substituted for the cost of the individual booking (including both venue and resource usage).

%TOTAL_COST% can be added anywhere in the template and will be substituted for the total cost of all the bookings listed in the email.

When editing templates via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Templates, a complete list is displayed of all available variables that can be inserted into the current templates.

We believe replacing the limited %CONTENT% variable with a flexible <bookings> … </bookings> section in email notifications will give customers far greater control over the appearance and content of emails sent through MIDAS.

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This post covers some of the improvements coming to the customizable “Templates” within MIDAS.

A range of customizable templates has been available to administrators for some time (ever since v3.12, way back in May 2011) via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Templates. v4.07 sees a number of improvements to these templates…

More Flexible Email Templates

In previous releases, there has been a single customizable email template which was applied to all outgoing emails sent through your scheduling system. For v4.07, we’ve extended the number of email templates to NINE!

You’ll now be able to modify separate email templates for booking confirmations, booking reminders, invoice reminders, invoice overdue notifications, booking request submitted/approved/rejected notifications, as well as the original “general” email template for all other emails.

You’ll also be able to customize the subject field of most of these emails templates too!

More Variables

To accompany the many new templates available in v4.07, we’re also introducing a range of new “variables” which can be inserted into your template code to provide even more flexibility.

For example, a new %CLIENT_FIRSTNAME% variable has been introduced alongside the previous %CLIENT% variable to allow your emails to be more informal by using the client’s first name instead of their full name.

A whole host of new invoicing variables have also been introduced including, %INVOICEDUEDATE%, %INVOICEDUEIN%, %INVOICEOVERDUEBY%, and %INVOICETERMS%, as well as new variables giving you far greater control over the “Invoice To” section of your invoices.

The previous %INVOICETO% variable (which includes the client’s name, organization, postal address and email address) can be broken down into smaller parts through the use of the new variables %INVOICETO_CLIENT%, %INVOICETO_ORG%, %INVOICETO_ADDRESS%, and %INVOICETO_EMAIL%

Visual Template Editing

The other big improvement for templates in v4.07 is the ability to edit your templates “visually” in the “Template Preview” area as well as manually in the “Template Code” area.

You can now type, copy, cut, paste, and move items around in the “Template Preview” area, and MIDAS will automatically generate updated template code from your edits.

Reset Templates

Messed up a template and want to start again? Each template within MIDAS can now be reset to its standard factory default.

Further Customize Web Request and Pay Online Templates with CSS

We’re also giving you even more control over the “look and feel” of your “Public Booking Request” and “Pay Online” screens by allowing you to specify your own external .css Style Sheets that will override the default theme your MIDAS is running in when these pages are displayed.

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To coincide with this new version, we’re also excited to be releasing a new edition of MIDAS, “MIDAS Lite”!

What is MIDAS ‘lite’?

MIDAS Lite is a scaled down edition of MIDAS. It’s aimed at those who don’t require all the features of the full edition and those on tighter budgets.

There are lots of exciting new features in MIDAS v3.12 too! Notably, the ability to accept public booking requests for your rooms. There’s a host of other features too including customizable print, email, and invoice templates, booking confirmations, and selective restore from backups

Video Tutorials

We’ve also updated our Video Tutorials section with three new video tutorials. There’s now over an hour’s worth of step-by-step video guides now available!

How to get MIDAS

If you’re an existing MIDAS user with a current Annual Support Package, you can upgrade to v3.12 right now! Simply login to your MIDAS, click the “MIDAS Admin Options” icon and select “Manage MIDAS -> Update”. If your Annual Support Package has recently expired, don’t worry – you can quickly renew it at https://mid.as/renew

If you’re new to MIDAS, you can check out fully-functional demos of both MIDAS and MIDAS Lite RIGHT HERE. To get MIDAS working for YOUR company/organization, head over to https://mid.as/pricing to get yourself a copy of the new MIDAS v3.12!

UPDATE: As from 1st August 2012, MIDAS Lite is no longer available, as our pricing has been restructured to make the full edition of MIDAS available starting from MIDAS Lite prices! You can read more here.

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Customize Templates

In previous versions of MIDAS you’ve been able to add a custom text footer to the bottom of emails and printouts, etc generated by MIDAS. You’ve also been able to add simple headers and footers to your invoices. For v3.12, we’ve completely overhauled this. We’ve included completely customizable templates for your printouts, invoices, and emails sent via MIDAS (previous versions of MIDAS only sent emails as plain text. MIDAS v3.12 onwards will send both plain text and HTML versions of your emails!). We’ve also provided a number of special variables you can include in your templates. For example, adding %LOGO% to your template code will display your company’s logo at that point

Booking Confirmations

If an email address is held in MIDAS for a client you’re making a booking for, MIDAS will now give you the option to send an automatic email confirmation to the client when you add their booking!

Selective Restore & Manual Backups

Did you know that your MIDAS automatically backs up its database upon the first successful login of each day? No? Well it does! …but in v3.12 we’ve also given you a “Backup Now” button. Clicking this button will take a complete “snapshot” of your database at that point in time. Should you ever need to restore/roll back your database to an earlier point in time, MIDAS gives you the ability to restore from one of these backups. In previous versions, restoring these backups would restored everything. This included your bookings, clients, invoices, etc. v3.12 will now give you the ability to selectively restore items from your backups! So rather than restore everything, you can choose to only restore booking data between two dates, for example!

Maximum Global Occupancy (Room Capacity) Checking

MIDAS already allows you to set a maximum occupancy level (capacity) for each of your venues. If you attempt to add a booking to that venue with more attendees than its capacity, MIDAS won’t let you! We’ve extended this feature in v3.12 to include a “Maximum Global Occupancy” setting. This refers to the total number of people you can safely accommodate on site across all your venues at any one time. No further bookings can be made during periods when the estimated number of people on site is expected to exceed this limit. You can also set warning threshold to warn people making bookings when you are nearing your Maximum Global Occupancy level!

New Booking Permissions

We’ve improved the “Can Add Bookings?” user permission in v3.12 to change the behavior of the booking form, on a per-user basis, from the normal form which adds bookings to MIDAS, to a similar form, but which only makes “booking requests” which have to be approved by a MIDAS user with sufficient privileges first before it is added as an actual booking! There’s more to come on “Booking Requests” too.. so watch this space!

• More features will be announced here shortly, so be sure to check back regularly for the very latest news!
• If you want try v3.12 now and help us test it, head on over to our BETA Test Suite

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