March 2014 - MIDAS - Room Booking System

Archive for March, 2014

World Backup Day

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March 31, 2014

World Backup Day

Today is World Backup Day, the purpose of which is to raise awareness of the importance of keeping your critical digital files and data backed-up.

A “backup” is a secondary copy of all your important files – for example, your family photos, home videos, documents and emails.

Instead of storing a single copy all in one place (like your computer), you keep another copy of everything somewhere else as well, in case anything should happen to the originals.

We strongly believe in the importance of backing-up data you can’t afford to loose, and we’ve built in a number of backup features to our popular web-based room and resource scheduling software, MIDAS to do just that!

By default, MIDAS automatically and seamlessly takes a complete backup on your database upon the first successful login each day. These database backups are compressed (typical backups are less than 1MB each in size), and are stored on the server where your MIDAS resides for a length of time you specify.

To further protect your data, these daily backups can also optionally be emailed to a pre-defined email address on a daily basis too, so that you can keep your own “off-site” copy too!

In addition, a manual database backup can be initiated instantly at any time via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Database → Backup Now.

Previous backups can also be easily and readily restored too, either partially or in full, via the simple user interface through MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Database → Restore.

Backup and Restore in MIDAS

For more information on the backup/restore features of MIDAS, please see https://mid.as/help/manage-database-settings

For our “hosted” customers (who don’t run MIDAS on their own infrastructure, but instead opt to have their MIDAS remotely “hosted” by us), we also take complete database backups daily, which are then stored off-site for a period of six months.

So, that’s how we ensure that your important MIDAS booking data can be kept regularly backed-up, but on World Backup Day today, why not take a moment to backup your own important family photos, home videos, documents and emails too!? It may seem like a hassle, but you’ll be glad you did should anything ever happen to the originals!

Tags: World Backup Day

Earth Hour 2014 – We’re doing our bit… are you doing yours?!

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March 28, 2014

Earth Hour

Tomorrow, Saturday March 29th at 8:30pm local time, millions of people across the world will be switching off lights for 60 minutes as part of “Earth Hour“.

Earth Hour is an annual global event, organized by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), encouraging individuals, communities, households and businesses to turn off their non-essential lights for one hour as a symbol of their commitment to our planet through a reduction in energy consumption.

We are once again very happy to be supporting this effort!

As you can imagine, running a global web-based business like MIDAS consumes a fair amount of energy to keep our infrastructure and administration up and running.

But at the same time, we take our environmental responsibilities seriously! That’s why we’ve already invested in servers with lower power consumption (some of our administrative servers draw as little as 18w of power!), and by replacing traditional mechanical hard drives with newer, more energy efficient Solid State Drives (SSDs)

We’d like to encourage other web & cloud based businesses like ours to do the same, and that’s why at 8.30pm tomorrow, we’re once again joining in with “Earth Hour” and will be switching off non-essential systems – not just lights – for 1 hour.

Note: This will not affect access to our website, or prevent our “hosted” customers from accessing their MIDAS scheduling systems during this period, but our non-essential administrative systems will be shut down for 60 mins, which may lead to a slight delay in responses to emails, etc.

So go on, make a difference and support Earth Hour at 8.30pm wherever you are in the world tomorrow!

Tags: earth hour

Improved Statistics and Reports

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March 20, 2014

We’re improving the statistics/reports that MIDAS can generate for you in v4.06 with three exciting new additions:

Venue Utilization Statistics

The new Venue Utilization report shows you the amount of usage that each venue has over a period of time. It will tell you for how many hours each venue is booked out of the total amount of hours available (taking into account the venue’s hours of operation too!), and give you a percentage utilization figure too!

Resource Statistics

The brand new Resource Statistics section generates a report into your resources (equipment, consumables, and staffing) over a period of time. It provides details of the number of each resource in use during that period, and an estimate of the income potential from each. In addition, the report indicates the current totals of all resources (as well as unique resources) in your MIDAS, and also provides an insight into the most “watched” resources.

Individual Client Statistics

Improvements to Client reports now mean that with v4.06 you can see detailed reports for each individual client. These reports show when the client was added to the system, how many bookings and invoices they have, the dates/times of their first, previous, next and last bookings (which can be clicked to jump directly to those bookings). The report also calculates the total combined length of all the client’s bookings, as well as the average length of their bookings

Tags: reporting, statistics, v4.06

New Flexible Venue Rates

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March 19, 2014

We’re introducing even more flexibility when it comes to setting your venue rates in MIDAS v4.06!

Currently, you can already set up hourly/daily rates for each of your rooms, and have different rates depending upon the day of the week.

In MIDAS v4.06, we’ve extended this to also allow you to define rates based upon the length of the booking as well!

For example, you can now set up a venue’s rates so that bookings lasting say less than 4 hours could be charged and invoiced at a higher rate than those lasting more than 4 hours.

You can also now define rates as “per booking” as well as “per hour” and “per day”. The new “per booking” option charges a fixed set amount for bookings.

So, as per the above screenshot, let’s say you define the following rates for “Meeting Room 1”:

$100 per hour for bookings lasting 1+ hours
$80 per hour for bookings lasting 4+ hours
$450 per booking for bookings lasting 6+ hours

Bookings for “Meeting Room 1” would then be charged as follows:

Length of Booking	Total Charge
1h	$100 ($100 x 1)
2h	$200 ($100 x 2)
3h	$300 ($100 x 3)
4h	$320 ($80 x 4)
5h	$400 ($80 x 5)
6h	$450 ($450)
7h	$450 ($450)
8h	$450 ($450)

We believe this additional flexibility when it comes to charging and invoicing for use of your venues will be great benefit to our customers. Of course, for those who don’t require this level of flexibility, MIDAS can be simply set to charge a single rate for “all bookings”:

Tags: invoicing, v4.06, venue rates