Posts Tagged: v4.28

Web Calendar Improvements

Filed Under: Development by midas — Leave a comment
July 9, 2021

A range of optional addons are available for our MIDAS room booking software.

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!

Web Calendar addon settings in MIDAS
Web Calendar addon settings in MIDAS

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

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SPF record checking in cloud hosted MIDAS systems

Filed Under: Development by midas — Leave a comment
July 8, 2021

Our support team often receive emails from customers who are having trouble receiving email from their hosted MIDAS booking system.

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 “[email protected]” 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.

Email settings and SMTP Test button in MIDAS
Email settings and SMTP Test button in MIDAS.

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.

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Reset Invoice Counters

Filed Under: Development by midas — Leave a comment
July 7, 2021

We’re giving administrators the ability to reset invoice counters in MIDAS v4.28.

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 you might wish to reset a 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:

Reset Invoice Counters in MIDAS
Reset Invoice Counters in MIDAS

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.

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Watch for Venue Availability

Filed Under: Development by midas — Leave a comment
July 6, 2021

In MIDAS v4.28, we’ve introduced a new “Notification Center“. In earlier versions of MIDAS, this functionality could be found within the “My Messages” screen.

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”.

Receive notifications when a space becomes free and available in MIDAS
New Venue Availability Watch option in MIDAS v4.28

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.

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