How To Manage Public Settings

Topics covered in this tutorial:

• Accessing Public Settings in MIDAS.
• Enabling/Disabling Public Booking Requesting.
• Enabling/Disabling Public Web Booking.
• Shared public settings.
• Selecting automatic or manual venue selection.
• Controlling how far in advance public bookings/requests must be made.
• Limiting public requests/bookings by email domain.

Tutorial Video Transcript

In this tutorial I'm going to show you how to manage public settings.

Now by default, all features and functions within MIDAS are only accessible to logged in users.

However, you can allow non users to be able to check availability of your venues, submit booking requests, and even make bookings online.

So you'll find the public settings by going to MIDAS Admin Options, selecting "Manage MIDAS" from the drop-down, and then selecting the "Public" tab.

So you'll see there's two options; we can enable public booking requests and we can enable public web booking.

So enabling booking requests will allow non users to be able to check availability and submit booking requests, which then require approval by an administrative user before they become confirmed bookings.

Alternatively, public web booking allow users check availability, make a payment and book directly online without any other user intervention.

So we can enable either or both of these options by selecting the corresponding boxes and you'll see when we do more options become available.

There are some specific settings for public booking requests, some specific settings for public web bookings, and some shared public settings that are applicable to both.

So let's first take a look at the specific public booking request settings.

Now when an administrator comes to approve or reject booking requests they can either do these individually or in bulk and if they choose to bulk approve, this setting configures the order in which requests are approved.

So you can select the earliest requested first, the latest requested booking first, the earliest commencing booking first, or the latest commencing booking first.

You can also select "Auto-Approve Booking Requests", and when selected, all booking requests are automatically approved without any administrative intervention.

Moving across to the specific public web booking settings.

You can specify the amount of time that a visitor has to complete their payments and secure their booking.

You can see this is currently set to 15 minutes.

If the visitor fails to complete their payment within this time - and a countdown clock will be shown on their screen - then they would need to start the booking process again.

Now there are separate video tutorials that will show you the steps to actually make a public booking request or a public web booking.

This tutorial is just focusing on the settings.

So we move on now to the shared public settings and the first setting is "Venue Selection".

If set to "Individual / Manual", then a visitor will be able to manually select which venue they wish to request or book.

If said to "Automatically from group", the visitor will simply need to select a venue group and MIDAS will pick a suitable venue from within that group.

So let's go back to "Individual / Manual" and you'll see the next setting here allows to put limits on how far in advance, or how close to the time, visitors can make requests or bookings.

So if we select "7 days" here, then when a visitor comes to make a public booking request or booking the earliest date they'll be able to select is in 7 days from now.

Or, if we select "No Restriction" then there are no restrictions on how soon a request can be made.

We can also limit up until what points requests and bookings can be made publicly.

So for example, if we select - let's go for 30 days - then public booking requests and public web bookings can only be made on dates from now for the next 30 days, and again that's a rolling 30 days.

We can also enter a specific date if we wish to disallow any bookings or requests past a specific date.

The next settings show how existing bookings are shown on the availability screen to members of the public.

So you may just want to show it's "unavailable" or you can actually specify an alternative booking field to show.

So you could show the client that the bookings for, but in most cases you probably going to want to keep this as "unavailable" because you won't want your requesters to see details of other people's bookings.

You can also optionally show the hours of operation for each of your venues and your venue capacities, or you can untick these boxes to hide that information from the public.

Finally, you can also limit who's allowed to make public booking requests or public web bookings by entering a comma-separated list of email domains.

So for example, if I only wanted to allow people with a MIDAS email address, I could enter it here - and again if you enter your organization's domain name here, then only members of your organization would be able to make public web requests or web bookings.

So those are the settings if we've got venue selection set to "Individual / Manual".

If we select "Automatic / From Group" you'll see there's a slight change in settings here, and this determines how MIDAS picks a venue from the venue group.

MIDAS can either pick a venue a random, or give priority based on the venue order you set up in your MIDAS system, or have a venue picks based on its utilization.

So if you select the "Least Used", then MIDAS will look at the number of bookings in each of the available venues, and offer the one with the least number of bookings.

And that's a brief overview of the public settings within MIDAS.

As I say, there are separate tutorials covering how to make public booking requests and public web bookings so be sure to check out those online.