They can do this without signing in or requiring a user account. These are known as the “Public” features of MIDAS.

The Public features of MIDAS comprise of two similar but distinctly different functions…

Public Web Bookings

The Public Web Bookings feature allows an individual to check room availability, book, and securely pay for their booking online.

Public Booking Requests

The Public Booking Requests feature allows an individual to check room availability and submit a booking “request” online. Once a booking request has been submitted, a “Manager” for that space can quickly approve or reject that request. Requests which are approved become confirmed bookings.

Greater control over public venue access

Now, you may not want all the spaces/rooms within your MIDAS booking system to be available for public booking/requesting.

That’s why on the Manage Venues screen, when an administrator selects a venue, there was a tick-box to make the venue “public”.

Until now, marking a venue as “Public” would apply to both public-facing Web Bookings and public-facing Booking Requests – if both features were enabled.

For MIDAS v4.41, we’ve made an improvement. You can now make each venue available for…

• Public “Booking”
• Public “Requesting”
• Both Public Booking and Public Requesting
• No Public Booking or Public Requesting

This small but significant improvement will now allow you to have some spaces directly bookable by the public. At the same time, you can have other spaces which must instead be “requested” and approved by an administrator.

This added flexibility makes it easier to balance accessibility with control – especially for venues that require approval before confirming bookings.

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Why did we choose the term “venue”?

There are a number of reasons why we originally settled on the term “venues” to describe bookable spaces.

Firstly, MIDAS was initially development for a large school in Manchester, England. The software which it had replaced at the school also used the term “venue”. So for consistency, the “venue” terminology was carried over into MIDAS.

Secondly, the school that MIDAS was originally designed for had not only rooms, but also sports facilities, a recording studio, a courtyard, and a theatre available for booking – so the term ‘room’ didn’t quite fit when it came to addressing things like football (soccer) pitches.

We also didn’t want to use the word “resources” to denote bookable spaces, as “Resources” in MIDAS are things like equipment and consumables that you can ‘add’ to bookings.

“Venues” don’t work for everyone!

From its first release nearly 20 years ago, MIDAS has since found booking applications across a whole host of industries and settings.

Today, MIDAS is used by bowling alleys, libraries, village halls, recording studios, cruise ships, vehicle rental companies and many more!

As such, the term “venue” we use to describe a bookable ‘thing’ isn’t necessarily always the most appropriate in all scenarios.

Changing the term “venue”

Now, self-hosted MIDAS customers have always been able to modify the included language packs to change the wording and terminology within their booking system. That way they can tailor the language used in their MIDAS system to their specific operations.

However, this can be quite a cumbersome process, and there’s been no way for cloud-hosted customers to make such changes (unless they have the optional Custom Branding addon)

But we’re improving this for MIDAS v4.39.

For new self-hosted or cloud-hosted installations of v4.39 (or later), the first time you login you’ll be prompted to select the term which best describes the primary ‘things’ you’ll be booking.

The 10 terms initially available to choose from are:

• Areas
• Desks
• Facilities
• Lanes
• Locations
• Rooms
• Spaces
• Studios
• Vehicles
• Venues

…so if you’re using MIDAS for managing bookings at a recording studio, you could select “Studios”. Alternatively, if you’re using MIDAS for desk booking in a library, you could select “Desks”

MIDAS will then replace all references to “venues” with your chosen terminology throughout the software.

Should you wish to change the term MIDAS uses in place of “venues”, you can update this setting at any time. You’ll find it via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Appearance → Language.

A couple of things to note…

The ability to change the ‘venue’ terminology as described above is only available when MIDAS is displaying in an English language variant.

You’ll still see references to ‘venues’ across our website. For example, in our online documentation, there are references to the “Manage Venues” screen. However, if you’ve set your MIDAS system to use the term “Rooms” instead, your “Manage Venues” screen will be a “Manage Rooms” screen.

The local documentation which accompanies your MIDAS system – and which is accessed via the [Help] links – will automatically update reflect the specific terminology you’ve set.

The post When the term “Venue” doesn’t quite fit appeared first on MIDAS - Room Booking System | Blog.

What do you call your meeting rooms? Do they have names? …or are they simply numbered “Meeting Room 1″, “Meeting Room 2“, and so forth?

Whatever naming (or numbering) convention you use, there will probably be some sensible logic behind it.

Our MIDAS booking software is used by organizations around the globe to manage countless meeting and conference rooms. It’s really easy within the software to change the names of your bookable rooms at any time.

So if you’re getting a little bored with mundane names for your rooms – if “Conference Room A” just isn’t cutting it any more, maybe it’s time for a refresh? …perhaps with a fun or humorous new name which will make users smile?

To give you some ideas, here are some funny, humorous, real examples that organizations have used to name their meeting rooms:

Google

Google is known for its quirky workplace culture, and they have various offices worldwide with creative meeting room names. For example, at Google’s Mountain View headquarters, you might find meeting rooms named after different desserts like “Cupcake“, “Donut“, and “Eclair“, as a nod to their Android operating system releases.

Facebook

Similar to Google, Facebook is also famous for its playful office environment. At Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, you’ll find meeting rooms named after popular board games like “Monopoly“, “Scrabble“, and “Risk“.

X / Twitter

Before Twitter became “X”, their headquarters in San Francisco has meeting rooms with names related to birds, reflecting the company’s then logo and theme. Examples include “Ostrich” “Hummingbird” and “Penguin“.

Airbnb

The vacation rental company Airbnb is known for its themed meeting rooms at its San Francisco headquarters. They have rooms named after different travel destinations, such as “Tokyo“, “Paris“, and “Rio“, adding to the company’s travel-inspired culture.

BuzzFeed

BuzzFeed, a digital media company, has meeting rooms with amusing names related to internet culture and memes. Examples include “Fail Whale“, “Cat Video“, and “Viral“.

Slack

Slack, the popular workplace communication platform, has fun and quirky meeting room names at its offices. Examples include “Llama Drama“, “Nerd Cave“, and “Corgi Corner“.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn, the professional networking platform, also has creatively named meeting rooms at its offices. Examples include “Career Catapult“, “Networking Nook“, and “Connection Corner“.

Groupon

The online deals company, Groupon, gets creative with names like “The Fountain from Friends” (referencing the show’s iconic hangout spot), “Disappointment Beach” (perhaps for giving feedback sessions a lighter touch), and “Tiny House for Big Ideas“.

Etsy

The Etsy online marketplace for crafts and handmade goods uses playful food-music combos for their meeting rooms, like “Fleetwood Mac ‘n Cheese” and “Wu Tang Clams“

These are just a few examples of organizations that have embraced humor and creativity in naming their meeting rooms, adding a touch of personality to their workplace environments.

If you’re feeling inspired to now do the same with your meeting rooms, it’s easy to change your room names in MIDAS.

Simply login (as an administrator) and go to MIDAS Admin Options → Manage Venues. On the Manage Venues screen, select the room you wish to rename, enter a new name for it and click “Save Changes”. Voila! Now your bookable space has an exciting and fun new name.

Now all there is to do is to get new name plates and signs made up for the actual doors themselves!

…or you could also consider our “Digital Signage” addon. This addon allows you to display upcoming bookings on display devices outside each of your rooms. If you update the name of a room within MIDAS, it will automatically be reflected on your digital signage screens!

The post What’s in a (Meeting Room) name? appeared first on MIDAS - Room Booking System | Blog.

What initially started off as quite basic functionality for setting your room rates, over the years as we’ve heard more from our customer’s specific pricing and charging scenarios – some of which have been quite complex!

As a result, over the years, we’ve constantly been developing more flexibility into how you can have MIDAS automatically calculate how much to charge your clients.

We’re now excited to announce that we’re adding even more options to venue rates, which we know will benefit a number of our customers!

More about that later, but first, let’s take a look back at some of the notable improvements we’ve made to MIDAS over the years to deal with a whole host of different pricing and charging structures.

September 2009

We first introduced invoicing capabilities with MIDAS v2.00 way back in September 2009.

From the outset, the initial invoicing features allowed administrators to define either “per booking”, “per day”, or “per hour” rates for each of their venues.

A different rate could also be set for each day of the week.

January 2011

Whilst the initial offerings of “per booking”, “per day”, or “per hour” charging rates worked well for many customers, since the introduction of invoicing in MIDAS, we’d heard from a number of customers who needed more flexibility.

Specifically, we have customers who charged different rates depending upon the “type” of booking taking place.

For example, internal users may be offered room hire at a discounted rate to that of external users.

We facilitated this scenario by introducing a new “Booking Type Discounts” feature from MIDAS v3.11.

This allowed for venue rates to be discounted by a specific percentage depending upon which Booking Type was assigned to the booking.

May 2014

The Booking Type Discounts feature certainly offered a lot more flexibility to venue charging in MIDAS.

But since its introduction, we’d also heard from customers who wanted to be able to charge different rates depending upon the length (duration) of bookings.

For instance, if a client wanted to book a space for a single hour, it would be charged at one hourly rate, whereas if they wanted to book the space for a longer period, it would instead be charged at a reduced hourly rate.

Eager to support as many different charging scenarios as practically possible, for MIDAS v4.06 we allowed setting different venue rates for different lengths of bookings.

September 2015

We made a small improvement to Booking Type Discounts for MIDAS v4.10.

Previously, Booking Type Discounts were just that – they “discounted” the standard venue rate.

For v4.10 we also allowed Booking Type Discounts to be set negative, effectively allowing venue rates to be increased from their standard rate for certain booking types.

April 2017

Further improvements came to Booking Type Discounts for MIDAS v4.15.

Discounts could now be set to take off a fixed (absolute) amount – rather than a percentage – of the standard rate.

July 2018

Another usage scenario was highlighted by a customer who wanted the ability to be able to charge for room hire based upon the number of people in attendance.

We therefore introduced a new “per person” venue rate option in MIDAS v4.19. This complimented the existing “per booking”, “per day”, and “per hour” options.

August 2019

Now, setting up (or modifying) your venue rates is something that you’ll likely do infrequently.

That said, as we’ve added numerous options to how your venue rates can be setup, it could become time consuming to set rates individually for each of the 7 days of the week.

So for MIDAS v4.22, we included an “All Days” tick box. When selected, this allowed an administrate to set the rates for just a single day of the week, but when saving have them applied to all seven days.

July 2020

Up until this point, MIDAS included a “global” tax setting that could be used to add a tax charge onto your invoice as required.

A further usage case was presented by a customer who only wanted to be able to charge tax on certain venues, with either a reduced tax rate, or zero tax on other venues.

To accommodate this, for MIDAS v4.25 we introduced “per venue” tax rates.

This allows you to setup a tax rate (percentage) for each individual venue in the software.

And now…

So that’s a brief overview of how we’ve constantly been improving the capabilities of our booking software over the years to meet our customer’s needs.

For MIDAS v4.32 we’re going even further!

A number of customers have requested the ability to be able to charge different rates depending on the time of day that a booking takes place.

For example, they may charge one hourly rate before 5pm and a different rate after 5pm.

That’s now possible starting with MIDAS v4.32!

You can set a rate based upon a booking’s start time within a given day.

These new “time of day” features can of course be used in conjunction with the other options for setting your venue rates.

You can still specify rates as either “per hour”, “per booking”, “per day”, or “per person”, have different rates for different lengths of bookings – at different times of the day, and on different days of the week!

The possibilities are immense and we hope this will cover almost every conceivable pricing structure that our customers have!

The post Setting Venue Rates just got more flexible! appeared first on MIDAS - Room Booking System | Blog.

The ability to “Colorize Venues” is an often voted for Feature Request, and so we’re implementing this for v4.25.

It’s long been our intention to do this, but our desired way to do so has until recently not been fully supported by all browsers. Now, browser support is at a stage where we can confidently implement this option.

Each individual venue in MIDAS can now be assigned its own color. The “row” in the booking grid for that venue will then appear “highlighted” in its assigned color.

A color may be assigned to each venue via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage Venues → [Select Venue(s)] → Colorize.

These are just a few of the new and improved features for MIDAS v4.25. Please see this post for details of other new features you’ll find in v4.25.

You can also ask questions and discuss the new features of v4.25 over on Reddit.

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Over the years as MIDAS has developed and improved, the number of venue options has greatly increased. Today, you can set hours of operation, simple and complex hire rates, venue managers, blocking rules, alternatives, and rich HTML descriptions.

These additional options have given our software even more flexibility for a wider range of applications. However, increasing the number of individual venue settings/options available, can increase the time it takes to set up or make changes to a venue.

That’s why last March, in response to customer feedback, we introduced a way to allow you to “bulk modify” venues. Users now no longer have to modify settings for each venue one at a time.

Doing Things In Bulk

The “bulk modify” venue feature allowed more than one venue to be selected at a time from the Manage Venues screen. When the “Save Changes” button was clicked, the current venue settings/options would be applied to all selected venues.

However, some users didn’t appreciate that settings including capacity, rates, hours, and managers would be blanket applied to all selected venues.

Therefore, in order to provide even grater flexibility for users, for v4.21, we’re making it even simpler!

Now, when you have multiple venues selected on the Manage Venues screen and you click ‘Save Changes”, MIDAS will prompt you to select which settings to save to the selected venues:

This new additional dialog gives users full control by making it easier to make specific bulk changes to venues. We’re sure you’re going to love the enhanced flexibility!

Check out some of the other new and improved features coming in v4.21 here.

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That’s why in v4.18, we’ve made it easier to make “bulk” changes to multiple venues at once, which we’re sure will be a real time saver!

On the “Manage Venues” screen, multiple venues can now be selected simultaneously from the “All Venues” list to the left. Any changes then made in the “Venue Details” section to the right will be applied to all selected venues.

Furthermore, you’ll also be able to remove venues in bulk (rather than one at a time)

Click here to continue reading about some of the other new & improved features coming in MIDAS v4.18!

The post Bulk Modify Venues appeared first on MIDAS - Room Booking System | Blog.

Now, the ability to “close” individual venues to bookings over a custom date range has long been a staple of MIDAS.

This has allowed users to, for instance, close a particular venue over a holiday period or when a venue is out of action due to a period of scheduled maintenance or refurbishment, etc.

The limitation of this feature has until now been that only one “closed from” and “closed until” date range could be defined for each venue at any given time.

Based upon feedback from our customers – notably including those in educational sectors – in v4.14 we’re improving the ability to close venues between dates, by now allowing multiple “closed” date ranges to be defined for each of your venues:

From this screen, simply select a date from the calendar as the “Closed From” date, and a second date as the “Closed Until” date. Clicking the small “+” icon in the lower right corner will then allow you to specify additional “Closed From” and “Closed Until” dates.

Dates that fall within these “Closed Between” date ranges will be unavailable to regular users for booking. (Administrative users however who have been specifically granted the special “Can book outside operating hours” permission can still book even when your venue(s) are closed to regular bookings)

Taking the example of a school/college/university – This improvement for v4.14 will now allow staff to enter dates for all the holiday periods throughout their academic year and beyond!

You can read more about some of the other exciting improvements coming in v4.14 here!

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This update packed full of new and improved features, many of which have originated from ideas and suggestions from our existing users.

An often requested feature is to have the ability to “route” booking requests to different users, depending upon the venue being requested.

Currently, all booking requests received by your MIDAS system go into a central “pool”. From this pool, any user with the “Can Process Web Requests” permission can view, approve, query, modify, reject, or lock the requests.

In MIDAS v4 however, Booking Requests can be routed to different users based upon the venue that’s been requested!

You can essentially configure which requests go to which administrators. In an educational setting this would, for example, allow sports staff to manage requests for your sporting facilities. At the same time, office staff could separately manage incoming requests for your meeting rooms.

How it works…

In MIDAS v4, you’ll find a new “Managers” tab on the “Manage Venues” screen.

From this tab, you can assign one or more existing users to “manage” booking requests for the selected venue:

Then, when a member of the public then makes a booking request for that venue, “managers” of that venue are sent an automated email notification by MIDAS. This informs them that a new pending booking request requires attention. These email notifications may be turned on/off at any time through the manager’s “Pending Booking Requests” screen.

The manager can then log in to MIDAS and go to their Pending Booking Requests screen. From here, they’ll see outstanding requests for all the venues they manage. Booking requests can be approved with a click of the mouse.

The Booking Request screen also offers additional functions. Requests can be modified – for instance, they can be moved to a different time, date, venue, etc. Requests can also be rejected, queried with the original requester, or locked. Locking a request prevents any other manager from processing the booking request whilst you’re dealing with it. For example, you may need to query something with the client before approving their request and don’t want another user approving their request in the interim.

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