One of the helpful features of MIDAS is the ability to allow visitors to your website to check availability of your facilities and submit booking “requests” online. They can do this without logging in or requiring an account.

Once a booking request is submitted, the manager(s) of the request facility are notified. A manager can then then quickly approve or reject the booking request in MIDAS with just a few clicks.

In MIDAS v4.14 in December 2016 we introduced the option to allow a manager to “bulk” approve or reject all outstanding requests with just a single click.

This saved time in instances where there were numerous booking requests which all required approval or rejection.

To be able to bulk approve a number of booking requests, a setting was made available. This instructed MIDAS as to the order in which it should approve requests when approving them in bulk.

The “Bulk Approval Order” setting has the following options:

• Earliest Requested First – Booking requests will be approved in the order in which they were received. The earliest request received will be approved first.
• Latest Requested First – Booking requests will be approved in the reverse order in which they were received. The most recently received request will be approved first.
• Earliest Commencing First – Booking requests will be approved in the order in which the requested booking would start. Requests for the soonest start times will be approved first.
• Latest Commencing First – Booking requests will be approved in the reverse order in which the requested booking would start. Requests for the furthest away start times will be approved first.

For MIDAS v4.37 we’re giving managers even greater control when it comes to processing multiple booking requests.

In addition to be able to approve or reject one booking request at a time, or “bulk” approve/reject ALL requests at the same time, you can now also selectively approve/reject multiple requests.

On the Pending Booking Requests screen there’s now a checkbox alongside each request that’s awaiting processing.

A manager can use these tick boxes to select multiple requests and then click the “Approve Selected” or “Reject Selected” buttons at the bottom of the screen to process the selected requests accordingly.

If no requests are selected, the “Approve Selected” and “Reject Selected” buttons change. They then become the familiar “Approve All” and “Reject All” options which if used process all requests in the queue.

The Public Booking Request feature of MIDAS allows non-users to check the availability of your rooms, and submit booking “requests” online. No user account or login is required in order to make a public booking requests.

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 ?