The first public version of our versatile room booking & resource scheduling system, MIDAS v1.00 was first unveiled to the world on 11th March 2006.

15 years on, and MIDAS is still going strong. To coincide with our anniversary, today we’re releasing the latest update to software, MIDAS v4.27.

Highlights of MIDAS v4.27 include:

• New: Print individual bookings direct from the Booking Information Panel
• New: Booking Requests can be auto-approved for certain email addresses / domains
• New: Predefined date ranges for Advanced Print Settings, Statistics, and Search date filters
• New: Search results can now be easily printed
• New: Recent Activity audit log can now be exported to Excel
• New: Exported client data now includes client’s current credit and tax exempt status
• Improved: Support for importing bookings with dates in the formats DD-Mon-YY/YYYY
• Improved: Advanced Filter Invoice Generating options now allow using a blank search term
• Improved: Advanced Filter Print options now allow using a blank search term
• Improved: Advanced Filter Print options now allow filtering by invoice
• Fixed: Cumulative roll-up of various fixes for issues discovered since v4.26

How To Get MIDAS v4.27…

15% OFF for our 15th Anniversary!

To celebrate our 15th year in business, all this week we’re offering 15% OFF NEW PURCHASES OF MIDAS.

We believe in giving customers maximum choice. That’s why we offer MIDAS in both a cloud-hosted edition (with monthly and annual subscription options), as well as a self-hosted (on-premises) edition for a one-time cost (with an optional subscription)

With this generous 15% discount, your organization can start scheduling with MIDAS for less than $30!

To get 15% off your initial purchase of MIDAS, simply head over to our secure checkout, and use the Promo Code MIDAS15.

You’ll need to hurry though! – This limited time offer expires on 14th March 2021

The post MIDAS v4.27 Out Now! appeared first on MIDAS - Room Booking System | Blog.

In this post we’ll brief touch on some of the other new features we’re introducing in v4.27.

Search results can now be easily printed

The “Print” icon in the MIDAS toolbar is really flexible! When viewing the Booking Grid, clicking the Print icon allows you to print bookings for the currently viewed date (or date range).

Furthermore, right-clicking the Print icon show advance print options allowing you to further customize booking print outs.

But that’s not all, the Print icon also allows printing in other areas of MIDAS. For example, when viewing reports/statistics, the Print icon will print the current report.

For v4.27 we’ve further extended the Print icon’s functionality in relation to search results.

When performing a search (via the “Search” toolbar icon), the Print icon can now be used to send the search results to your printer.

The Recent Activity audit log can now be exported to Excel

The “Recent Activity” feature in MIDAS allows administrators to view an audit log of all recent user activity within your booking system. This includes log ins and outs as well as bookings added, modified, and deleted.

Each entry in the Recent Activity log is timestamped with the user who performed each action, as well as their IP address.

This allows a full audit trail to be maintained for actions taking place in your MIDAS system.

For v4.27, we’ve added an “Export” button to the Recent Activity log. This allows you to easily export the log to Excel.

Exported client data now includes current credit and tax exempt status

Whilst we’re on the subject of exporting data from your MIDAS system; Exporting client data (MIDAS Admin Options → Export → Clients) in v4.27+ will now also include each client’s current credit and tax exempt status.

Note: This information will only be included in exported client data if the user performing the export has been granted the “Can use invoicing” permission.

Improved booking import support

As you may be aware, MIDAS allows you to import bookings from 3rd party software.

When importing bookings, MIDAS needs to know the date format used in the data you’re importing.

Every 3rd party application stores/exports dates differently, and so we strive to support as many different date formats as possible.

Currently supported import date formats are:

• DD.MM.YYYY (Example: 23/07/2021)
• DD.MM.YY (Example: 23/07/21)
• MM.DD.YYYY (Example: 07/23/2021)
• MM.DD.YY (Example: 07/23/21)
• YYYY.MM.DD (Example: 2021/07/23)
• YYYY.DD.MM (Example: 2021/23/07)
• YY.MM.DD (Example: 21/23/07)
• YY.DD.MM (Example: 21/07/23)
• DD.MM.YYYY HH.MI (Example: 23/07/2021 16:30)
• MM.DD.YYYY HH.MI (Example: 07/23/2021 16:30)
• HH.MI.SS – Day DD Month YYYY (Example: 16:30:00 – Friday 23 July 2021)
• HH.MI-HH:MI, Day DD Month YYYY (Example: 16:30-17:30, Friday 23 July 2021)
• Day DD Month YYYY HH.MI – Day DD Month YYYY HH.MI (Example: Friday 23 July 2021 16:30 – Friday 23 July 2021 17:30)

For MIDAS v4.27, we’re adding support for a couple more date formats:

• DD.Mon.YYYY (Example: 23-Jul-2021)
• DD.Mon.YY (Example: 23-Jul-21)

This extensive range of supported date formats for your raw booking data should cover the formats used by most 3rd party applications.

If you have booking data that you wish to import that doesn’t conform to one of the above date formats, please let us know and we’ll try and add support in a future update.

Advanced filter improvements

When advanced printing or when generating invoices, MIDAS offers an advanced “filter” option. This allows you to include/exclude bookings from your printout/generated invoice(s).

For v4.27 we’ve imported these advanced filters to now allow blank (empty) search terms.

This improvement now allows you to include/exclude bookings where a certain booking field is blank, which previously you couldn’t do.

We’ve also further improved the advanced print filter to allow filtering of bookings by invoice.

This allows you to now generate a printout of bookings which match, partially match, or don’t match a particular invoice number.

Custom logo improvements for cloud hosted customers

MIDAS allows you to “co brand” the software by uploading your own logo. This logo then appears throughout the software. For example, it is included on the login screen for your MIDAS system. It can also then be included in various templates in MIDAS – including email and invoicing templates.

Your logo may be added/changed via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Appearance → Logo.

Our cloud hosted customers may notice that when changing their logo, the changes are not immediately visible. This is due to the way our network “caches” static content, like logos. Sometimes it can take up to 24 hours to a logo change to be visible.

We’re improving this for MIDAS v4.27. Now, when our cloud hosted customers change their logo, their new logo should be visible right away!

How To Get MIDAS v4.27…

The post Other new features in v4.27 appeared first on MIDAS - Room Booking System | Blog.

When a booking request is made, “managers” for the requested venue are notified by MIDAS. They can then log in and quickly approve, reject, or modify the pending request.

The ability to have different managers for different rooms allows incoming requests to be filtered to the right department/person within your organization.

Public Booking Requesting is one of the most popular features of our software. It is a well feature widely used by our customers in their booking operations.

Auto Approval of Booking Requests

Back in October 2013 – with the release on MIDAS v4.04, we introduced the option to have all booking requests “auto approved”. With this option enabled, MIDAS would automatically approve all incoming booking requests with no manager intervention required.

Many customers don’t need this functionality, and instead prefer to manually review and approve each incoming booking request.

But for organizations such as large universities which allow students to book their own study rooms, the ability to have booking requests auto-approved is a real time saver.

Selective Auto-Approval

To extend this auto approve functionality though, we’re introducing a new option for MIDAS v4.27:

Now, if the “Auto-Approve Booking Requests” option is enabled, there are two choices;

• All
• For these email addresses / domains

The “All” option retains the previous auto-approve behavior. If selected, then all incoming booking requests will automatically be approved by MIDAS (subject to availability).

The “For these email addresses / domains” option allows you to instruct MIDAS to auto-approve requests from certain email addresses or domains. This setting will take a comma separated list of email domains or individual email addresses.

If a person makes a booking requests under an email address which matches this setting, their request will be auto-approved by MIDAS.

If a booking request is made from under an email address which doesn’t match this setting, then venue managers will be notified and would need to manually review the request.

This powerful new auto-approve option can have some real benefits!

For instance, you could set anyone “internal” to your organization to have their booking requests auto-approved, whilst still requiring external requestors to have their requests manually approved.

How To Get MIDAS v4.27…

MIDAS v4.27 isn’t yet publicly available. It is expected to be made available to Beta Testers soon, with a full public release shortly after. In the meantime, why not check out some of the new features that were included in v4.26 ?

The post Conditional Auto-Approval For Booking Requests appeared first on MIDAS - Room Booking System | Blog.

There are a number of ways this is facilitated in MIDAS.

Firstly, you can quickly print bookings for the currently viewed date (or date range) in the booking grid. This is achieved by simply clicking the “Print” icon in the MIDAS toolbar.

Furthermore, you can also right-click this icon to generate more advanced printouts.

MIDAS also allows you to print any individual client’s past or future bookings, or those over a specific date range.

We know that these extensive print capabilities within our software are extremely valuable to our users. However, until now there hasn’t been an easy way to print details of just a single individual booking.

Printing a single booking

This has been an often requested feature on our Feature Requests page. We’re therefore delighted to be able to introduce this for MIDAS v4.27.

Users who have been granted the “Can print” user permission, will notice the addition of a small print icon in the upper right of the Booking Information Panel:

This icon will be present whenever the Booking Information Panel has been set to retain its information. The Booking Information Panel is populated when you “hover” your mouse over a booking in the booking grid. Now, normally, this information then disappears from the Panel when you move away from a booking. However, the small small “Pin” icon in the top-right corner of the Panel retains this last selected booking’s details. When set to retain information, the new Print icon will be displayed.

When this new small print icon is clicked, a window will open displaying all the information shown in the currently selected tab of the Booking Information Panel. This information is displayed in a printer-friendly format, and your browser’s native print dialog will then be shown.

So, if the “Booking” tab is currently selected, you’ll be able to print out all the information for the displayed booking.

When the “History” tab is selected, you’ll be able to print the full edit history for the displayed booking.

And, of course, if the “Client” tab is selected, you’ll be able to print detailed client information for the displayed client.

How To Get MIDAS v4.27…

MIDAS v4.27 isn’t yet publicly available. It is expected to be made available to Beta Testers soon, with a full public release shortly after. In the meantime, why not check out some of the new features that were included in v4.26 ?

The post Print Individual Bookings appeared first on MIDAS - Room Booking System | Blog.

For MIDAS v4.27 we’re making it really quick to select common date ranges.

Previously, to select a date range in these areas, you’d be presented with two fields, each of which may be selected separately to show a popup calendar. This allowed selecting both a start date and finish date for the date range.

In v4.27 you’ll notice that we’ve now added a small “…” icon after these dates:

Clicking, or simply “hovering” your mouse over this “…” icon will show a dropdown list of common date ranges:

Selecting one of these common date ranges will automatically populate the start and finish dates respectively.

This makes it really fast to select, say, the last 7 days of bookings with just a single click!

Previously, this would take a minimum of 4 clicks! (Clicking once on the first date, clicking again to select a date from the resulting popup calendar, and then repeating this again for the second date).

How To Get MIDAS v4.27…

MIDAS v4.27 isn’t yet publicly available. It is expected to be made available to Beta Testers soon, with a full public release shortly after. In the meantime, why not check out some of the new features that were included in v4.26 ?

The post Quickly Select Common Date Ranges appeared first on MIDAS - Room Booking System | Blog.