Here’s what a few customers have already said on this exciting brand new feature:

“Trying not to overreact here…THIS IS THE BEST NEWS EVER! … This just changed everything!”
“Very nice – love the Booking Alternatives feature!! – Bring it on!”
“4.09 looks good, especially that Booking Alternatives feature!”

We’re excited to announce that this new update is now available, so you can start taking advantage of all the new features of v4.09 for yourself!

Here’s what’s new and improved in MIDAS v4.09:

• New: Booking Alternatives
• New: When “Unavailable” is shown on the Booking Availability screen, it’s now possible to see details of the existing conflicting booking
• New: Associate multiple email addresses with client records
• New: Bulk delete (expire) Messages, Reminders, and Watch Notifications
• New: Pending Booking Requests screen can be printed
• New: SMTP “Test” button
• New: Help Documentation is now searchable (via the Search screen)
• New: Optional High Resolution SVG Theme
• Improved: When deleting a booking type, it’s now optional to remove all bookings of that type
• Improved: When importing users, additionally also adding them as clients is now optional
• Improved: SSO support now allows searching for users in multiple AD bases
• Improved: Performance when no connection to server
• Change: SSL Access setting removed for Hosted customers as SSL is always available
• Fixed: Cumulative roll-up of various fixes for issues discovered since v4.08 – see https://bugs.mid.as for details

How To Get MIDAS v4.09

New customers can purchase v4.09 securely and directly through our website at https://mid.as/pricing

Existing MIDAS customers running “self-hosted” editions with a valid Annual Support Subscription can update to v4.09 from within the software right now via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Update.

Existing customers who instead have their MIDAS hosted by us in the “cloud” don’t need to do anything – we’ve already automatically updated you to v4.09!

We hope you enjoy the new & improved features of MIDAS v4.09!

The post MIDAS v4.09 Now Available! appeared first on MIDAS - Room Booking System | Blog.

However, the features we’re perhaps most excited about, revolve around those instances where you encounter an “Unavailable” on the Booking Availability screen because the venue/times you’ve specified would conflict with an existing booking.

We’ve made two significant improvements in this area for v4.09 – firstly, an icon will appear alongside any instance of “Unavailable” which you can hover your mouse over to see full details of the existing booking which conflicts with the one you’re trying to make, in the Booking Information Panel.

But wait – that’s not all! MIDAS v4.09 is also capable of offering you booking “alternatives” in the event of a conflicting booking!

MIDAS can offer you alternative times for the booking you’re trying to add (i.e. earlier or later than you’d originally specified), as well as alternative venues at the times you’re trying to book. Selecting one of the offered alternative times/venues can be done with a single click from the Booking Availability screen, so there’s no more having to go back and “Change Booking” to try a different time/venue yourself, MIDAS will offer such alternatives for you!

What’s more, we’re giving you lots of control over the “Booking Alternatives” feature…

For instance, you can control whether MIDAS should offer earlier times, later times, alternate venues, or any combination of the three.

Furthermore, when offering earlier/later alternative times, you can enforce a “spacing” (or “buffer”) between the conflicting booking and the proposed alternative.

Where MIDAS is set to offer alternative venues, you can specify for each of your venues which other venues should be offered as suitable alternatives:

Watch a short 3 minute video tutorial on the new Booking Alternatives feature:

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Today we’re excited to tell you about an improvement coming to client records within MIDAS. Until now, it’s only been possible to associate a single email address with each client record. This has meant that booking confirmations and reminders as well as invoices can only be sent to the single email address on record for the client in question.

From MIDAS v4.09, you’ll now be able to specify multiple email addresses for each client record, and accordingly, email correspondence (such as booking confirmation/reminder notifications, and invoices, etc) can be automatically sent to multiple email addresses.

Why might this be useful?

Well, we’ve had a number of requests from customers for such capability when it comes to client email addresses. For example, some customers have clients where the email contact for the booking itself differs from the email contact for invoicing. This new improvement to email addresses in MIDAS v4.09 will allow you to assign both the booking contact’s email address and the invoice contact’s email address to the same client record, so that all email correspondence from your MIDAS will go to both!

Similarly, if you have a booking for an external organization, for which there is more than one contact person, you could create a generic client for the organization, and add all their contact email addresses to it, thus ensuring that correspondence is distributed to them all.

Important information for Cloud-Hosted users

• Cloud-Hosted customers who have their MIDAS system configured to send email via the built-in “Sendmail” option will be limited to sending email to a maximum of two email addresses per client record.
• Cloud-Hosted customers who have their MIDAS system configured to send email via the external “SMTP” option will be limited to sending email to a maximum of five email addresses per client record.
• To avoid these limits, and be able to assign as many email addresses to an individual client record as you’d like, please consider switching to a self-hosted edition. These limits on the number of email recipients are not applied to self-hosted editions.

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We’ve designed MIDAS to be visually “responsive”. That means that it adapts itself to displaying on a wide range of device screen and orientations, including desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices.

For MIDAS v4.09 we’re also introducing a new special “High Resolution” theme. This is ideally suited if you access MIDAS from a device with a large, high definition, screen.

So how does this “High Resolution” theme work?

Well, traditionally, images and icons within the various visual themes for MIDAS have been in JPG or PNG image formats.

These are very common, standard, image formats which have been around for years. They’re used on just about every website you’ll visit!

JPG images are traditionally used for photographic or background images. In fact, in the majority of the visual themes available for MIDAS, a .jpg image is used as the main background image. JPG images are “compressed” leading to small file sizes (and therefore faster downloading times) whilst retaining a high level of detail.

PNG images on the other hand are traditionally “lossless”, meaning they retain all the original image information without compression. They have the advantages over JPG of being higher quality and also allowing for transparency. However, they but have the disadvantage of typically being larger in size than a JPG equivalent image.

MIDAS makes use of PNG images for the various buttons and icons contained within each theme.

We carefully optimize both JPG and PNG images within the various theme packs available for MIDAS to make them as small and as quick to load as possible, without noticeably affecting image quality.

One major downside of both image formats however is that neither “scale” particularly well….

Enter SVG!

SVG stands for “Scalable Vector Graphics”. An AVG image can be scaled up without any loss of quality or blurred edges.

Here’s a good way to illustrate this using the standard “Add Bookings” PNG icon found in the default theme which ships with MIDAS:

The icon at normal size	The icon at x3 its original size

Now, let’s look at an equivalent SVG icon:

The icon at normal size	The icon at x3 its original size

As you can see, at its original dimensions (40 x 40 pixels) both the PNG and SVG icons look virtually the same. However, scaling both by a factor of three leaves the PNG icon looking distinctly “blurry”, whilst the SVG equivalent retains its “crispness”.

That’s why, for the benefit of users with very high resolution displays, we’ve created a “High Resolution” version of the Default theme for MIDAS v4.09 which uses SVG icons, and SVG gradient backgrounds. We’ve also made the traditional blue background image slightly less of an intense “blue” as a result of customer feedback.

Here’s an example of how the traditional “Default” theme compares with the new “High Resolution” theme in v4.09:

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