We’re now making it easier to apply bulk permission changes across multiple user accounts.

Previous Behavior

In previous versions, when adding or modifying a user account, an “assign permissions from group” drop-down was presented above the various user permissions that could be assigned:

This was a great way to quickly copy the current permissions from a user group to an individual user account.

However, this was a one-time action. MIDAS would snapshot the selected user group’s current permissions and apply them to the individual user account. Any subsequent changes to the group’s permissions would not affect existing user accounts.

Introducing Permission Inheritance

So we have re-worked this for MIDAS v4.42. The “Assign permissions from group” selector has been removed and replaced by a new role-based “Inherit Permissions from” selector.

When a user account is set to inherit permissions from a user group, any subsequent changes to that group’s permissions will automatically apply to all linked user accounts.

This now allows you to bulk modify user account permissions with ease!

When to use manual permissions

If you still want to grant or revoke individual permissions on a per-account basis, you can – simply set the “Inherit Permissions from” option to “[None]”. When you do this, MIDAS will display the complete list of current permissions for that user, allowing you to make individual changes as required.

User accounts set to ‘[None]’ will not be affected by changes to any user group permissions.

While this new feature may not be all that significant for customers with only a handful of user accounts, larger organizations with several hundred users will benefit greatly from the ability to modify user permissions in bulk.

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These allow the creation of anything from fully privileged administrative accounts to ones with very limited “view only” permissions, and everything in between.

To provide administrators with even greater control, we’ve extended the range of available permissions for MIDAS v4.42 to now include 14 additional administrative permissions.

These new permissions replace the previous “Can Manage MIDAS” permission. This generic permission controlled whether a user was able to access the “Manage MIDAS” configuration screens.

Over time the “Manage MIDAS” screens have grown to include a vast array of options and settings. These screens allowed users to change email settings, update templates, configure scheduled tasks, tweak invoice or database settings, and much more.

For v4.42, we have split up the old “Manage MIDAS” screen into separate sections. Access to each section is now controlled by its own dedicated permission. This means, for instance, that you can grant permission to a user to be able to modify your templates, but not allow them to adjust the email settings of your MIDAS system.

The 14 new administrative permissions added in v4.42 are:

• Can Manage Appearance Settings
• Can Manage Booking Settings
• Can Manage Database Settings
• Can Manage Email Settings
• Can Manage Fields
• Can Manage Invoice Settings
• Can Manage Miscellaneous Settings
• Can Manage Print Settings
• Can Manage Public Settings
• Can Manage Safety Settings
• Can Manage Scheduled Tasks
• Can Manage Security Settings
• Can Manage Templates
• Can Update Software (Not applicable in cloud-hosted systems)

When updating from an earlier version to v4.42, any user account which held the “Can Manage MIDAS” permission will automatically be granted all 14 of the new administrative permissions during the update.

Administrators can then refine access for each user account via MIDAS Admin Options → Users.

These changes, together with the ability to make bulk permission changes, provide administrators with significantly greater flexibility and control over who can access specific system settings.

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Previously, users couldn’t change their display name or email themselves – only an administrator could do this. An administrator could also grant or deny the ability for each user to be able to change their account password.

“Why would you ever not want to allow a user to change their password?” you’re probably thinking!

Many organizations like to create a very limited and generic ‘view only’ account in their MIDAS system. One account that a number of staff all share.

Obviously, you wouldn’t want one person to change the account password on such a ‘shared’ account and lock every one else out. So on this account an administrator could revoke the “Can Change Password” permission to strengthen account security.

For MIDAS v4.41 we’ve added a couple of new and related permissions…

Allow Users To Change Their Display Name

With the new “Can Change Display Name” permission granted to a user account, that user will be able to change their display name within your MIDAS system any time they wish.

Allow Users To Change Their Email Address

With the new “Can Change Email Address” permission, a user will be able to change the email address associated with their MIDAS user account. This is the address they use to sign in with and receive notifications at.

How a user updates their details

If a user has been granted at least one of the following permissions…

• Can Change Display Name
• Can Change Email Address
• Can Change Password

… then they can change their details at any time from the drop-down menu that’s displayed when they select their name (under the main date heading), and then select “Your Details”:

From the “Your Details” dialog, the user will be able to modify one or more of their details (depending upon permissions granted)

Administrators can also see when a user last updated their details from the Manage Users & Permissions screen:

For a complete list of all the booking software permissions that can be assigned on a per-user account basis in MIDAS, please see: https://mid.as/help/manage-users-and-permissions/list-of-available-user-permissions

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For MIDAS v4.30 we’ve improved the range of options available for the “Maximum bookings allowed” setting.

This is a per-user setting enabling administrators to restrict the number of bookings individual users can make for a given period.

This setting itself isn’t new – it was first introduced in v4.11. However, this setting initially only allowed an administrator to set a maximum number of bookings each user could add to any individual date.

For v4.15, the setting was expanded to include an alternative “Per Week” option. This allowed restrictions to be placed on the maximum number of bookings a user could add to any given week.

With MIDAS v4.30, we’ve now added a further two options to this setting – Month and Year.

These new additional options give administrators even greater control over bookings. Users can now be limited to a maximum number of bookings for any date, week, calendar month, or calendar year.

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For MIDAS v4.29, we’re expanding the range of options available to administrators when it comes to assigning user permissions.

MIDAS already includes an extensive range of permissions which can be assigned on a per-user basis. One of these permissions is the “Can Make Bookings” permission. This setting controls whether a given user account can make bookings, or just booking “requests”, or neither.

Following customer feedback, we’re adding a couple of additional options to this particular user permission.

Now administrators can restrict user accounts to only be able to book/request for themselves.

Prior to this, a user with permissions to make bookings/requests could select a client on their Add Bookings screen that the booking or request was to be for.

Now, if the “Can Make Bookings” permission is set to “Yes (For self only)”, the user will only be able to make bookings for themselves. They will not be able to make bookings for any arbitrary client in the system.

Similarly, the “Requests Only (For self only)” option works the same, but only allows the user to make booking requests for themselves.

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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.

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.

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In our previous article, we announced support in v4.24 for a new multi-select custom list field. In this blog post, we’re revealing a new user permission we’re adding to our forthcoming update.

“User Permissions” in MIDAS allow administrators to precisely control what each user account within the system can access. From very restrictive “view only” permissions to fully-fledged administrator – and everything in between! In fact, there are in excess of 30 individual permissions you can set on a per-account basis. A full list of these permissions may be found here.

For v4.24 we’re adding a new additional user permission: “Can Bypass Venue Blocks”. To understand the purpose of this new permissions, we first need to understand what “Venue Blocks” actually are..

What are venue “blocks”?

Back in 2014, we introduced “Venue Blocks” to MIDAS. You can read more about this cool feature in this blog post. Essentially, venue “blocking” allows administrators to set up rules so that when a certain venue is booked, another venue is then automatically blocked from having any bookings during the same time period.

An example of where this may be useful is in a Church environment where you have a quiet prayer room adjacent to a sports hall. It may be desirable to prevent noisy bookings taking place in the sports hall when there’s a prayer meeting happening in the room next door. This is where Venue Blocking comes in.

Another example might be a large room which can either be hired as a whole space, or sub-divided and hired as two separate, smaller rooms. Obviously, if one of the sub-divisions is booked, another booking couldn’t take place in the space as a whole at the same time. Again, this is where Venue Blocking in MIDAS becomes really useful, as you can easily prevent such occurrences.

Bypassing Venue Blocks

Until now, however, there has been no way to “override” venue blocks, short of removing the blocks from venues themselves. That’s why we’re introducing the new “Can Bypass Venue Blocks” permission for v4.24:

This permission isn’t granted to any user by default. However, any user account subsequently granted the “Can Bypass Venue Blocks” permission, can then make bookings regardless of any venue blocking rules in effect.

We’re sure this additional user permission will be of considerable use in helping you manage your bookable spaces more effectively. And once again, this improvement is being implemented as a direct result of feedback from our users. We love hearing feedback and suggestions for improvement and new features from our customers. Why not vote on some suggestions and let us know what you’d like to see in MIDAS in the future!

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Today we’re excited to announce two new user permissions in v4.11 to compliment the extensive range of user permissions already available in MIDAS.

Maximum bookings allowed per date

• This setting allows you to limit the maximum number of bookings a user may add to any particular calendar date. Left blank, there will be no limit imposed on the number of bookings a user can make.

Maximum booking length

• This setting allows you to restrict the maximum length of bookings (in minutes) a user is allowed to make. Left blank, there will be no limit imposed on the maximum length of bookings.

If either of these limits are enforced for a particular user, and the user reaches these limits, they will be notified accordingly on their Booking Availability Screens:

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