Archive for March, 2017

World Backup Day 2017Today marks the annual World Backup Day, an event designed to raise awareness of the importance of keeping your critical files and data regularly backed-up.

We strongly believe in the importance of regularly backing-up data you can’t afford to loose. With that in mind, we built in a number of backup features to our world class web-based room booking and resource scheduling software, MIDAS.

In the background, MIDAS makes a complete and automated backup of its own database and settings upon the first successful login each and every day. These compressed database backups are then stored on the server where your MIDAS resides. Typically, compressed backups are each less than 1MB in size. They’re then stored on the server for a period of time you specify, typically up to 30 days.

To further protect your data, these automated daily backups can optionally also be emailed to a specified email address each day. This allows you to retain your own “off-site” copy of your database too!

In addition to the automated backups that MIDAS makes, our scheduling software also provides the ability to manually generate instant backups at any time. This can be achieved via a simple one-click “Backup Now” button. You’ll find this button via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Database → Backup Now.

Database backups (whether generated manually or automatically) can be easily and readily restored at any time. You can choose to restore either partially or in full via a simple user interface. This can be found via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Database → Restore. So, should you ever wish to “roll back” your MIDAS system to an earlier point in time, or if you suffer a massive server failure and loose data, you can quickly get your MIDAS system back up and running!

Backup and Restore in MIDAS
Easily Backup and Restore Data with MIDAS software

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

For our cloud hosted customers we also take complete database backups daily. These backups are then stored off-site at two separate locations for a period of six months.

Even More Backup Options

What’s more, we also offer an optional “Emergency Access” addon to our hosted customers. This optional addon allows cloud-hosted customers to access a “real-time” backup of their MIDAS system in event that they’re ever unable to access their primary MIDAS system. These backups run on different servers, in different data centers, via different ISPs to our Primary Servers.

So, as you can see from all the above features and procedures we’ve built into our software, that we take data backups very seriously! We make it easy to ensure your important MIDAS data can easily be backed up and restored with minimal fuss!

But on World Backup Day today, whilst your MIDAS data is taken care of, why not take a moment to backup your own important personal files? Your family photos, home videos, documents and emails are important! Could you stand loosing them? Whilst it may seem tedious and time consuming, you’ll be glad you did should anything ever happen to the originals!


New Public “Book Online” feature

With MIDAS v4.15 just around the corner, we’re offering a “first look” at some of the highlights coming in the next update to our web based room booking and resource scheduling software.

From the very outset MIDAS has included an ability to allow non-users to check availability of your facilities and submit booking “requests” online. “Non users” are visitors to your website, members of the public, etc.

These booking “requests” then go into a pending booking requests queue. Administrative users can quickly approve or reject each request. Approved booking requests then become “confirmed” bookings.

You can find out more about how this works in our “Accept Booking Requests Online” video tutorial.

We know that our customers love this long-standing feature of MIDAS. Put simply, it makes their lives significantly easier. That’s because it allows people to check room availability themselves, without having to phone/email/speak to an administrator.

We also know that some of our customers would like the Public Booking Request features to go one step further. You’d like to allow non-users to check availability, book and pay for their booking instantly there and then (rather than having to be invoiced for their booking at a later date)

That’s why in addition to the “Web Request” features of MIDAS, for v4.15 we’re also introducing a “Web Booking” feature.

The “Web Booking” process is very similar to the traditional “Web Request” process. The difference being the addition of a payment step, allowing the individual to pay to confirm their booking.

Here’s How It Works:

  1. A person selects the date(s)/time(s) they wish to book, and MIDAS checks their availability.
  2. If available, the person can enter more details about their booking and continue to the payment page.
  3. At this point, the booking is temporarily added as a “tentative” booking until the person completes payment. At this point the tentative booking automatically becomes a “confirmed” booking.

If the person fails to complete their payment in a timely manner, the temporary tentative booking will automatically expire, and the person would need to re-start the booking process. By default, this time frame is set to 15 minutes, but can be changed by an administrator.

As per the native invoice payment methods offered within MIDAS, both PayPal (with IPN correctly configured) and Stripe are available for Web Booking payments. Stripe however is recommended over PayPal.

The “Web Request” and “Web Booking” features share a set of common settings. So we’ve redesigned the previously named “Web Request” tab on the Manage MIDAS screen to become the “Public Settings” tab:

New Public Settings
New Public Settings

As you can probably tell from the above screenshot, the new auto-venue selection option we unveiled earlier this month, will also be available for “Web Booking”.

The combination of new auto-venue selection and Web Bookings helps make MIDAS even more suited for hotels, B&B’s, hostels, and other overnight accommodation businesses. Your customers will now be able to truly “book online”!

You may like to check out some of the other features of MIDAS v4.15 too!


Maintain fixed spacing between bookings

Work on the next update to our popular web based room booking and resource scheduling, MIDAS, is nearing completion. We’re excited to reveal some of the exciting improvements you can look forward to first here on our blog…

Resulting from customer feedback (which we love getting by the way!), we’re introducing new global settings for v4.15 allowing administrators to enforce fixed spacing (or “gaps”) between adjacent bookings.

Maintain Spacing (Gaps) Between Bookings
Enforce a “gap” between adjacent bookings in MIDAS

This can be useful to allow for room setup, breakdown, reset or cleaning periods between adjacent bookings.

Two new settings are available in this regard. The first controls the amount of free time to maintain before each booking. The second, the amount of free time after each booking finished before the next one can commence.

For example, with the booking spacing settings shown in the screenshot about (15 minutes before / 30 minutes after), and a booking taking place between 2pm-3pm;

  • The latest allowed finish time of a booking added earlier in the day would be 1.45pm,
  • The earliest allowed start time of another booking added later on the same date would be 3.30pm.

You may like to check out some of the other features of MIDAS v4.15 too!


New Un-invoiced Bookings Report

Work on the latest feature-rich update to our web based room booking and resource scheduling, MIDAS, is nearing completion, and so we’re excited to reveal some of these exciting new and improved features first here on our blog…

As you may be aware, MIDAS is capable of generating a wealth of printable reports, graphs, and statistics allowing you to gain valuable insight into the state of your bookings, venues, clients, invoices, and more.

The Invoicing section of this reporting allows you to see which clients or organizations have been invoiced over any given period, how much has been paid, and how much remains outstanding.

For MIDAS v4.15 we’re improving this reporting to also include an “Un-invoiced Bookings Report”. This new report shows a breakdown of the number of bookings each client/organization has over a given period which have so far not been invoiced for. This is a great way to quickly check whether you’re forgotten to invoice a particular client/organization.

New Uninvoiced Bookings Report

You can check out some of the other reports MIDAS can generate to help you gain insight into your facilities at https://mid.as/help/statistics