We’d like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very Happy New Year from all of us here at MIDAS HQ, and also announce the availability of MIDAS v4.05!

MIDAS v4.05 features better support for iPads, touch-screen devices, and portrait-orientated devices, new Venue “Blocking” features, improvements to invoicing, and much more, including:

• New: Venue “Blocking” – Prevent bookings in specific venues when another venue is booked
• New: “Include in Invoice Notes” setting allowing inclusion of a specified booking field on generated invoices
• New: “Auto-Login” option to bypass login screen upon subsequent visits from your browser
• New: Optional “Slate” theme
• Improved: iPad support
• Improved: Better support for touch-only devices
• Improved: Better support for portrait-orientated devices
• Improved: “Apply To All” button for times, etc when selecting multiple dates through Public Booking Requests
• Improved: Full-width graphs in Statistics view
• Improved: MIDAS now remembers the number of days shown in the booking grid between sessions
• • Improved: MIDAS now remembers sort order of Pending Booking Requests screen
• Improved: MIDAS now remembers last viewed tab on Manage MIDAS screen
• Improved: Invoice Notes can now be itemized per booking
• Improved: Selected Group/Manager counts shown on tabs on Manage Venues screen
• Improved: Setting Default Tax Amount blank will hide tax line on invoices with no tax
• Improved: Background data refreshes less frequent when MIDAS isn’t the active browser tab/window
• Improved: HTML5 conformance
• Improved: Better error handling if update fails
• Improved: Better error handling if SMTP fails
• Improved: Grid Lock/Unlock action (Accesskey “u”)
• Improved: Logo resolution
• Improved: Full Screen support for IE11
• Improved: Help Documentation (you can now also download offline documentation at https://mid.as/manuals)
• Fixed: Cumulative roll-up of various fixes for issues discovered since v4.04

You can view the full Changelog for MIDAS v4.05 here

Keep Your Browser Up-to-date!

We want you to have the best possible user experience when using MIDAS in your favorite Web Browser. We support our web based scheduling software in all 5 major browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera), and a list of the minimum and recommended versions for each of these browsers we support can be found at https://mid.as/browsers.

Important Information for users of Internet Explorer 8

As we first indicated back in November 2012, and again in March 2013, we would soon be dropping support for Internet Explorer 8.

Therefore, starting with MIDAS v4.05, Internet Explorer 8 is no longer supported. That’s not to say that MIDAS will suddenly stop working in IE8, on the contrary, MIDAS may continue to function in IE8 for some time to come, and we’re certainly not “blocking” access to MIDAS if you still use IE8 – but it means that we are no longer actively supporting this obsolete browser, and therefore if you encounter any issues running MIDAS in IE8, we will no longer be addressing them, and will instead encourage you to update your web browser.

How To Get MIDAS v4.05

Existing MIDAS customers with valid Annual Support Subscriptions can update to v4.05 from within the software (MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Update)

Customers who have their MIDAS “remotely hosted” by us – you don’t need to do anything – We’ll be automatically updating you to MIDAS v4.05 this weekend!

If you’re not yet using MIDAS, why not start off the New Year by getting your organization’s room scheduling in order once and for all with our intuitive, popular and easy to use, web based software MIDAS!?

Why not give MIDAS a try now, and Read what some of our existing customers say

Once again, on behalf of everyone at MIDAS, we wish you all the very best for 2014 and we hope it will be a prosperous year for you!

The post Happy New Year! – MIDAS v4.05 Now Available! appeared first on MIDAS - Room Booking System | Blog.

So we thought we’d take a moment to reveal some of the other improvements you can expect with the next update to our powerful web based room scheduling solution, this time in Invoicing:

Improvements to Invoicing

Previously, the “Booking Notes” associated any booking for which an invoice was generated were automatically included in the “Invoice Notes” area of the corresponding invoice.

In MIDAS v4.05, you’ll be able to disable this behavior, or choose a different booking field (including custom fields) to include in the “Invoice Notes” section of your generated invoices.

What’s more, we’ve included an “Itemize” option so for invoices containing multiple bookings, MIDAS can automatically denote which “notes” apply to which bookings:

After feedback from a couple of our customers, we’re also introducing a way to completely remove the “Tax” line from your invoices if you don’t charge tax, and don’t want to show a 0% tax rate on your invoices. In MIDAS v4.05, setting the “Default Tax Amount” blank (rather than just 0%) will hide the tax line on invoices where there is no tax element (existing invoices which contain a tax element will not be affected and will still show the tax line)

Now, back to Black Friday – if you’re not following us on Twitter (@mid_as), then right now you’re missing out on some incredible deals – for today only – for both new AND existing customers of our MIDAS web based room scheduling software

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We’re making numerous improvements, including improved accessibility for devices without a physical keyboard, and improved support for devices operating in “portrait” orientation.

For example, below left is how the upcoming MIDAS v4.05 update will look on an iPad Air in “portrait” orientation, compared with how MIDAS v4.04 currently looks on the same device, below right:

As can be seen from the above images, in current versions of MIDAS, the screen layout in “portrait” orientation is far from optimal – we’ve overhauled this for v4.05 by rearranging and resizing various visual elements to make your MIDAS experience easier to navigate and interact with on your portrait orientated tablet device.

Now the toolbar icons will appear across the bottom of the screen, the booking grid has expanded to fill the entire width of the screen, with the calendar and booking information panels near the bottom just above the toolbar:

Don’t like this layout? No problem – just rotate your device into “landscape” orientation to revert to the familiar desktop screen layout.

We’ve also made significant improvements for touch devices when it comes to selecting multiple items from drop-down lists as well as actions requiring keyboard interaction:

Selecting multiple items from drop-down lists

If we take the “Add Bookings” screen as an example, this screen allows you to select one (or more) venues to add your booking to. This wasn’t an issue on a desktop, laptop, or other device with a keyboard, as multiple venues could be selected from the list by holding down “Ctrl” (in the case of Windows devices) or “Cmnd” (in the case of Apple Mac devices) whilst clicking.

On touch-based devices such as iPads, this isn’t quite as easy! Our solution has been to replace these multi-select elements with checkbox elements, allowing easy selection of multiple items even from touch-only devices!

Moving and Duplicating bookings from the grid

For a while now, we’ve given you the ability to quickly move (reschedule) or copy (duplicate) bookings directly within the booking grid by simply dragging and dropping bookings whilst holding down a key (i.e. Shift or Ctrl, etc). We realize that this isn’t that useful to those using touch-devices – so we’re changing this behavior for v4.05. You will be able to move/copy bookings with ease – simply click (or tap!) the padlock icon under the main toolbar, and you’ll be presented with a choice of dynamic grid editing options:

Simply select your option, and then you can dynamically edit bookings in the booking grid!

Adding MIDAS to your home screen

We’re also making it really easy to add MIDAS directly to your iOS Home Screen for quick one-click access to your bookings!

…all these forthcoming improvements for iPads and other touch-screen tablets mean that with MIDAS v4.05 you really can have the MIDAS “touch“(!)

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Venue Blocking allows you to define a set of “rules” for making some rooms become automatically “Unavailable” when certain other spaces are booked.

Let’s take a closer look at how “Venue Blocking” can be useful in a typical usage case…
Say you have a large “Sports Hall” that can either be booked in its entirety, or divided into two halves that can each be booked separately…

The 3 different spaces available for booking (“Sports Hall”, “Half Hall A” and “Half Hall B”) can each be added to MIDAS as individual venues:

Now, if someone books the entire “Sports Hall”, you then want to prevent anyone else from being able to book a half hall at the same time – and that’s where Venue “Blocking” comes in!

You can setup a few simple blocking rules to prevent the “Sports Hall” from being booked if either half (or both halves) of the hall have been booked, and vice versa. This is achieved from the new “Blocking” tab on the Manage Venues Screen (MIDAS Admin Options → Manage Venues). In the screenshot below you can see that “Half Hall A” and “Half Hall B” have both been set to be blocked when “Sports Hall” is in use:

Once your blocking rules have been defined, MIDAS will then apply them accordingly when checking booking availability. In the below example, we’ve tried to book all 3 spaces at the same time, and because of the blocking rules that have been defined, MIDAS prevents us from booking all 3 spaces:

So as you can see, “Venue Blocking” is a very useful and powerful addition to our web based software, that’s coming with our next update, MIDAS v4.05.

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