To that end, we’re now excited to share with you our latest update – MIDAS v4.28 – in this our 15th Anniversary year.

Highlights of MIDAS v4.28 include:

• New: Notification Center (formally “My Messages”)
• New: Watch for venue availability
• New: Ability to reset invoice counters.
• New: Support for Custom Branding / White Labeling via optional addon
• Improved: Recent Activity Log display performance
• Improved: SMTP Test now performs an SPF record check
• Improved: Database Backups are now encrypted at rest (Requires OpenSSL 1.1.1+)
• Change: Some template placeholder variables have been renamed
• Fixed: Cumulative roll-up of various fixes for issues discovered since v4.27
• Security enhancements
• Optimization: Code optimization

New & Improved Addons

Our range of optional addons extend the capabilities of your MIDAS system. To coincide with the release of MIDAS v4.28 we’re launching two brand new addons, as well making improvements to some existing addons too.

New Addons:

Custom Branding With this new addon, you can completely remove visible traces of “MIDAS” and the MIDAS logo from your booking system, and instead replace them with your own name and logo! Read more…

Domain Alias With this new addon, you can make your cloud-hosted MIDAS system appear as though it’s running on your own domain instead of your marko.mid.as domain! This makes it an ideal companion addon with our new Custom Branding addon. Read more…

Improved Addons:

API We’ve added a couple of new API calls, allowed bespoke styling to be included in emails sent via the API, and also added support for returning more appropriate http status codes with API responses. Read more…

Web Calendars Our improved Web Calendars addon now allows you to embed bookings for individual dates, as well as allowing your visitors to request/book directly from the calendar! Read more…

How To Get MIDAS v4.28…

How to get addons…

The post MIDAS v4.28 Out Now! appeared first on MIDAS - Room Booking System | Blog.

The log records logins/outs, failed login attempts, bookings and clients added, modified, or removed, emails sent, database backups, and more.

The Recent Activity log can be quickly accessed by administrators from a dedicated toolbar icon.

Data from the log is shown on screen in chronological order (newest entries first), and is split into 4 columns:

• Date / Time – The date and time that the event occurred
• Originating IP – The IP address that the event originated from
• User – The user account that initiated the event
• Action – The event itself

The Recent Activity log may also be exported directly to Excel.

We’ve made a number of improvements to the performance of the Recent Activity log for MIDAS v4.28.

These include…

Log entries now load in blocks

For each and every action which occurs in a MIDAS system, an entry is made in the recent activity log.

Entries in the log are typically kept for a period of 30 days before automatically being removed. This retention period can be change to keep logs for longer or shorter periods.

For very active MIDAS systems (or those with a long log retention period), the Recent Activity Log can become very large.

To display a lengthy log in its entirety could slow down the viewer’s browser, and in some extreme cases make it appear that their browser has frozen/hung.

To address this, from v4.28 the Recent Activity log no longer displays all its entries at once.

If the log contains a high number of entries, only the newest entries will be shown, along with a “Show More” button at the bottom of the screen. Clicking the “Show More” button will load and append the next set of log entries to entries currently shown on screen.

The “Show More” button will continue to show as long as there are more entries in the log which aren’t currently being shown on screen.

The number of log entries shown on screen is derived from the “Maximum search results to display per page” setting. This setting usually controls the number of search results returned per page via the built in “Search” feature. However, the number of Recent Log Entries shown in each “block” is twice this setting. So if “Maximum search results to display per page” is set to the default of “50”, then 100 Recent Activity log entries will be shown at once.

Failed login attempts are now collated

One of the benefits of the Recent Activity Log is that it records all failed login attempts to your MIDAS system.

This may happen, for instance, if a user enters their password incorrectly.

Similarly, if may also happen if someone tries to login to a non-existent account.

In today’s world, hackers use automated tools to try to “brute force” their way into systems. They do this by sending automated login requests using different email/password combinations. Often dozens, if not hundreds, of automated requests could be made every second.

As MIDAS logs failed and invalid login attempts, automated tools could soon flood the Recent Activity log with failed login entries.

To combat this, we’ve made a change in v4.28. Now instead of displaying every single failed login attempt, multiple failed login attempts from the same IP address will show as a single entry. This entry will indicate the total number of failed attempts, the time of the first attempt, and the time of the most recent failed attempt.

Faster rendering and displaying of the log

In addition to loading log entries in blocks, for v4.28, we’ve also streamlined the actual HTML code used to display log entries on screen.

This has more than halved the number of “nodes” (elements) that your browser has to process and render in order to display the recent activity log.

The result is that the Recent Activity Log now loads far quicker than it did before!

The post Recent Activity Log Performance Improvements appeared first on MIDAS - Room Booking System | Blog.

This allows you to re-brand (white label) a MIDAS booking system, removing any references to “MIDAS” and replacing them with your own name and logo.

The “Custom Branding” addon is available to both self-hosted and cloud-hosted customers.

Now, for cloud-hosted customers, if you want to remove references to “MIDAS” from your booking system, you’ll still have the “mid.as” reference in the actual URL for your MIDAS system (i.e. “example.mid.as”).

Our new companion “Domain Alias” addon solves this issue!

It allows you to setup access to cloud hosted MIDAS system via another domain instead. – for instance a sub-domain of your organization’s own website domain.

So for example, if your hosted MIDAS domain was “example.mid.as”, and your organization’s own domain was “example.com”, you could use the optional Domain Alias addon and set say “bookings.example.com” to use as the URL for your hosted MIDAS system instead.

Setting up a domain alias is a simple 3-step process:

1. Enter the domain/sub-domain you wish to “alias” to your hosted MIDAS system.
2. Make a small DNS change on your organization’s domain using the information provided in the addon
3. Confirm that you’ve made your DNS change

Once your changes become active, you’ll be able to access your hosted MIDAS system via your chosen domain alias.

For more information about this optional addon for cloud-hosted customers, please visit: https://mid.as/domain-alias

The post Domain Alias Addon appeared first on MIDAS - Room Booking System | Blog.

Our new optional “Custom Branding” addon can completely re-brand our software. This allows you to create a “white-label” software edition in which you can apply your own branding.

Visible traces of the word “MIDAS” can be removed, along with the MIDAS logo, links to the MIDAS website, and more. In their place, you can give the booking software your own bespoke name, logo, and icon.

An extensive range of customization options are available through the Custom Branding addon. These provide extended control over your booking system’s appearance:

The new Custom Branding addon also allows easy modification of any of the included “language packs” in MIDAS too. This means that you can completely customize all the wording and phrasing used throughout the software.

Moreover, the Custom Branding addon is available for both self-hosted and cloud-hosted editions of MIDAS.

For more information on this exciting addon, please see our new Custom Branding addon pages.

If you’re a cloud-hosted MIDAS customer, you may also be interested in our new “Domain Alias” addon. This addon compliments our “Custom Branding” addon. The Domain Alias addon allows you to make it appear that your hosted MIDAS system is in fact running on your own domain!

The post Custom brand (white label) your booking system appeared first on MIDAS - Room Booking System | Blog.

One of our most popular addons is the “Web Calendars” addon.

This addon generates customizable monthly overview calendars of your room bookings, which can be seamlessly embedded directly into your own website to allow visitors to see what’s on.

Here’s an example of an embeddable Web Calendar using live data from our free online public demo:

Each calendar’s settings and appearance may be configured. You can, for instance, limit a Web Calendar to only show bookings from certain rooms, or that are of a certain booking type.

Since our Web Calendars addon first launched, we’ve had lots of positive feedback from customers. We’ve also had suggestions of how the Web Calendars addon could be improved to better meet specific needs.

Well, we’ve listened, and so for v1.38 of the Web Calendars addon (available for MIDAS v4.28+) we’ve added some exciting new features!

NEW: Embed single day Web Calendars

You can now embed a Web Calendar for a single day’s bookings into your website. Here’s an example of Web Calendar showing today’s bookings using live data from our public demo:

NEW: Allow visitors to book/request a date directly from a Web Calendar

One of the settings you can configure for each Web Calendar is what happens when someone clicks on a date or a booking. Until now, the only options available were:

• Do Nothing
• Show extended info for the selected date in a popup
• Show extended info for the selected booking in a popup

Additionally, you can now also select:

• Request this date
• Book this date

If “Request this date” is selected and someone clicks on a date in a monthly Web Calendar, they’ll be taken to the Public Booking Request screen with their selected date pre-selected.

Similarly, for the “Book this date” option, the visitor will be taken to the Public Web Booking screen with their selected date pre-selected.

IMPROVED: Web Calendars can now be referenced by name

The Web Calendars addon can generate multiple embeddable calendars for you. To choose which calendar to embed, you’d previously have to pass its numeric reference number in a URL parameter.

We’ve now made this more user-friendly, by allowing Web Calendars to be referenced by name.

So for example, if you create a Web Calendar and name it “TestCal”, you can embed it by simply appending “?calendar=TestCal” to your Web Calendar URL.

IMPROVED: Setup/Breakdown times can now be included in Web Calendars

Setup/Breakdown periods were first introduced to MIDAS in v4.23. Until now, however, this information couldn’t be displayed on Web Calendars… well now it can! We’ve added support for additional placeholder “variables” in your Web Calendar templates to allow you to include setup and breakdown times or lengths!

Find out more about the new and improved Web Calendars addon for MIDAS at https://mid.as/web-calendars

The post Web Calendar Improvements appeared first on MIDAS - Room Booking System | Blog.

We have a useful “Why am I not receiving email from my MIDAS system?” article in our extensive Knowledge Base. Its purpose is to help users resolve common email deliverability issues.

Now, assuming email settings are correct in a customer’s MIDAS system, then the most likely cause is a missing or incorrect SPF record for their organization’s own domain.

What is SPF?

SPF stands for “Sender Policy Framework”. Its purpose is to prevent unauthorized sending of email purporting to be from someone within your organization.

It’s function is best explained with an example…

Let’s assume that your cloud-hosted MIDAS system resides at “demo.mid.as”, and your own organization’s own domain is “example.com”.

You may wish your MIDAS system to be able to send emails appearing from “bookings@example.com” even when your booking system is hosted at another domain (i.e. demo.mid.as).

However, if an SPF record has not been correctly configured on your “example.com” domain to authorize “demo.mid.as” to send email on behalf of your organization’s own domain, emails sent from your MIDAS system will likely not arrive.

In a previous article we explain the importance of SPF in more detail. That article also covers how to correctly set an SPF record for MIDAS email delivery.

Anyway, back to email settings in MIDAS itself. Email settings may be configured via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Email.

When choosing to have outgoing email sent via your organization’s own SMTP (mail) server, an “SMTP Test” button is shown. This allows you to send a test email to yourself using the SMTP settings you’ve entered.

SPF Record Check

Starting with MIDAS v4.28, we’ve added an SPF record check into this SMTP test for cloud hosted customers.

This will attempt to retrieve the SPF record for your domain. You’ll see a warning if the SPF record not been correctly configured to authorize your MIDAS system to send email on behalf of your organization.

We hope this check will assist our cloud-hosted customers in setting up an SPF record for their domain to ensure maximum email deliverability.

The post SPF record checking in cloud hosted MIDAS systems appeared first on MIDAS - Room Booking System | Blog.

Previously, invoice counters could only be reset through the optional MIDAS API.

What are invoice counters?

Each time a new invoice is generated or created in MIDAS, it is assigned a unique incremental number. This is prefixed with an editable string of characters.

So for instance, if the invoice prefix was set to be “MIDAS”, then the first invoice added in MIDAS would be numbered “MIDAS0001“. The second invoice would be automatically assigned “MIDAS0002“, the third “MIDAS0003” and so forth.

Separate counters and prefixes exist for both deposit and cancellation invoices too, as well as for credit notes.

Whilst their prefixes can be changed at any time, the numeric “counters” themselves are internal and couldn’t – until v4.28 – be easily changed.

That meant that if your invoice counter was up to 0123 and you wanted to change prefixes from “MIDAS” to “TEST”, the next invoice to be generated would be “TEST0124”.

Why might I need to reset an invoice counter?

Some of our customers commented that it would be useful to be able to “reset” invoice counters back to 0001.

This is particularly useful for users who first wish to test the invoicing capabilities of MIDAS by creating some example invoices. Then once they’re comfortable with the invoicing features of MIDAS, start using them for “real” invoices.

Until now, the only way to reset an invoice counter was via the optional MIDAS API.

For MIDAS v4.28, we’re providing the means to reset an invoice counter without requiring the API.

Administrators can reset an invoice counter at any time via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Database → Database Tools → Reset Invoice Counter.

The Reset Invoice Counter screen looks like this:

The screen displays the current counter for regular, deposit, and cancellation invoices, as well as for credit notes.

To reset any of these counters back to 0001, simply click/tap the corresponding “Reset” button.

To prevent the chance of this resulting in duplicate invoice numbers in MIDAS, counters may only be reset if no other invoices/credit notes with same prefix exist in the database.

Therefore, before resetting a counter it’s recommended that you either remove all existing invoices with the current prefix, or change the prefix to something else.

Invoice/Credit Note prefixes may be modified via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Invoicing.

The post How To Reset Invoice Counters appeared first on MIDAS - Room Booking System | Blog.

As part of the new “Notification Center”, we’ve added a brand new type of “Watch” notification. “Watch” notifications allow you to be automatically notified whenever certain activity occurs within your MIDAS booking system.

For example, you may wish to be notified whenever a new booking is added to a particular venue, or when a particular type of booking is modified. You may also wish to be notified whenever certain “consumable” resources are running low.

From MIDAS v4.28 you can now create Watches for “Venue Availability”.

We know it can be frustrating when you go to book a room and find that it’s already been booked.

Well, wouldn’t it be great if MIDAS could automatically notify you should that timeslot become available again?

That’s exactly what Venue Availability watches allow you to do!

Simply select a currently occupied date, room, and time slot, add a new Watch, and MIDAS does the rest!

Should the unavailable time slot become available again (for instance, if the existing booking is moved or deleted), MIDAS will automatically notify you.

The post Watch for Venue Availability appeared first on MIDAS - Room Booking System | Blog.

All the previous functionality of “My Messages” has been retained, but we’ve given the screen itself a bit of a “facelift” to de-clutter and simplify things.

We’ve even introduced a new “Watch” option… but more on that later.

For users with the “Can use Notification Center” permission, their Notification Center may be accessed via the new “bell” icon in the MIDAS toolbar.

Here’s how the new Notification Center itself looks:

The Notification Center comprises three components:

• Messages
• Reminders
• Watches

The numbers in the upper right corner of these component’s icons denoted the number of notifications currently in each section. Clicking the corresponding icon toggles the display of notifications for that particular section.

In the lower right corner of each icon, there’s a smaller icon that allows you to add/configure each section.

Messages

The “Messages” section displays internal messages you’ve received from other users in your MIDAS system. The “+” icon allows you to leave a message for another user:

For more information on messaging another user, please see the Help Documentation.

Reminders

The “Reminders” section displays both booking and custom reminders you’ve set. To set a new booking reminder, simply select a booking in the Booking Grid, and then “Add Reminder”. To set a custom reminder, click the “+” icon near the bottom right of the “Reminders” icon in your Notification Center:

For more information on Reminders, please see the Help Documentation.

Watches

The “Watches” section displays watch notifications. These are generated when certain activity that you specify occurs within your MIDAS system. The “cog” icon adjacent to the “Watches” icon is used to configure your Watch notifications.

There are three types of Watch notification available:

• Bookings
• Consumables
• Venue Availability

“Bookings” allows you to monitor and be alerted to new activity in certain venues, and/or for certain booking types, and/or for certain resources.

“Consumables” allows you to monitor levels of your consumable resources.

“Venue Availability” allows you to be alerted if and when a currently unavailable time slot for a given venue becomes available again. This is a brand new feature introduced for v4.28, which you can read more about in this post.

For more information on Watch notifications, please see the Help Documentation.

Notification Center Settings

You can adjust your Notification Center settings from within the Notification Center via the “cog” icon in the upper right corner.

These settings allow you to control how and when you receive notifications from your Notification Center.

The post New Notification Center appeared first on MIDAS - Room Booking System | Blog.