Now, here at MIDAS as we are a small and agile online business, and as such our operations haven’t been significantly affected at this time. For all intents and purposes, it’s “business as usual” here at MIDAS. Our sales team is still available online (via email or Live Chat) to answer any pre-sales questions you may have. Our support team is still providing prompt assistance to customer’s support queries (you can view our latest response times on our dedicated Service Status site).

As such, we’ve decided to press ahead with the release of our next update to MIDAS, v4.24, which is available now.

Highlights of MIDAS v4.24 include:

• New: Support for multi-select custom list fields
• New: Post booking email option – send clients an automated email after their bookings have taken place
• New: “Can Bypass Venue Blocks” user permission (disabled by default)
• New: Optional “Reviews” addon – automatically collect feedback, ratings, and reviews from your customers
• Improved: List of organizations in drop-down on Invoicing screen now limited to organizations with invoices
• Improved: BCC to me option when emailing an invoice/receipt now remembers user’s previous setting
• Improved: Individual client statistics now include count and sum of outstanding invoices and client’s current credit
• Improved: When assigning the “Can Process Booking Requests” permission, MIDAS will indicate if the user isn’t currently a manager of any venues
• Fixed: Cumulative roll-up of various fixes for issues discovered since v4.23

How To Get MIDAS v4.24…

Thank you for your continued support of our software during this unprecedented period of global uncertainty. Please remember if you’re an existing customer affected by the current situation, that we’re here to support you!

The post MIDAS v4.24 Out Now! appeared first on MIDAS - Room Booking System | Blog.

In our previous post, we revealed a new editable “Booking Feedback” template and options to allow your MIDAS system to automatically send clients a post-booking follow-up email. This could be used, for example, to thank them for their recent visit and to encourage them to use your facilities again soon.

To further enhance and extend this new feature, we’re also introducing a new optional “Reviews” addon, which works in conjunction with this feature. This addon allows you to automatically collect feedback, ratings, and reviews of your facilities/business on leading independent review sites, such as Trustpilot.

Initially, the new optional “Reviews” addon supports four leading independent review platforms;

How It Works

The “Reviews” addon works by automatically notifying an independent review collection platform after a client’s booking has taken place at your facilities. The review platform then in turn sends out a review invitation by email to your client asking them to leave a review or rating of your business on their website.

Here’s how the process works:

1. A client’s booking in MIDAS takes place.
2. Shortly thereafter, MIDAS automatically sends the client a post-booking email (the content of which is customizable via a template)
3. When this email is sent, it is also transparently BCC’d (Blind Carbon Copied) to your chosen review collection platform
4. The review platform in turn sends your client an invitation to rate/review your business on their independent review platform

What you’ll need

In order to be able to take advantage of the functionality the optional “Reviews” addon offers, you’ll need the following:

• MIDAS v4.24 (or later)
• A valid account with a supported review platform (see above for a list of currently supported review platforms)
• Your MIDAS system correctly configured to send email
• Scheduled Tasks correctly configured to run in MIDAS, and the new Post-Booking email notification option enabled.

Complete documentation for the new Reviews addon is available online.

Once MIDAS v4.24 is released, new customers will be able to purchase the “Reviews” addon through our secure site.

Existing customers with valid subscriptions running MIDAS v4.24 may add the optional “Reviews” addon to their system by upgrading.

Are there any other review platforms you’d like to see included in this addon in the future? Let us know!

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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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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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Our first update in 2020 includes a host of new and improved features, which we’re going to give you a look at in the coming blog posts.

In this post we’re going to cover the first of these new features coming in MIDAS v4.24:

Multi-Select Custom List Fields

One of the reasons our room bookings software is so flexible and versatile is that we allow you to create your own bespoke booking fields, and more recently your own bespoke client fields too!

The types of custom booking/client fields you can create in MIDAS are as follows:

• Checkbox – A “tick box” field
• File – (self-hosted editions only) Allows uploading/attaching of files and documents to client records
• List – A drop-down list of pre-defined items
• Number – A field that will only accept numerical input
• Range – A “slider” control allowing selection of a numeric value within a defined range
• Text – A single-line text field
• Text Area – A multi-line text field
• URL – A navigable web link to an external resource

Documentation on how to create and use custom fields in your MIDAS system may be found here. We also have a short tutorial covering custom fields too:

Until now the custom “List” field allowed users to select a single item from a list of pre-defined values created by an administrator, and assign the selected item to the booking or client record.

For v4.24, we’re expanding the custom “List” field options to additionally include a “multi select” list option. Administrators can now also create drop-down lists from which users may select multiple options.

Administrators will of course also be able to select which option (or options) in the list are selected by default, and also control whether the list is visible to all users, or restricted to just certain users:

We’re excited about the new custom “multi-select list” field option coming in v4.24. Once again, this has been implemented as a direct result of customer feedback. Remember, we love feedback and feature requests from our customers, so do vote and let us know what you’d like to see in future updates to our software.

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