Archive for July, 2021

Domain Alias Addon

Filed Under: Development, News, Releases by midas — Leave a comment
July 13, 2021

In our previous blog post, we introduced our new optional “Custom Branding” addon.

This allows you to re-brand (white label) a MIDAS booking system, removing any references to “MIDAS” and replacing them with your own name and logo.

The “Custom Branding” addon is available to both self-hosted and cloud-hosted customers.

Now, for cloud-hosted customers, if you want to remove references to “MIDAS” from your booking system, you’ll still have the “mid.as” reference in the actual URL for your MIDAS system (i.e. “example.mid.as”).

Our new companion “Domain Alias” addon solves this issue!

It allows you to setup access to cloud hosted MIDAS system via another domain instead. – for instance a sub-domain of your organization’s own website domain.

So for example, if your hosted MIDAS domain was “example.mid.as”, and your organization’s own domain was “example.com”, you could use the optional Domain Alias addon and set say “bookings.example.com” to use as the URL for your hosted MIDAS system instead.

Domain Alias Addon for MIDAS
Domain Alias Addon for MIDAS

Setting up a domain alias is a simple 3-step process:

  1. Enter the domain/sub-domain you wish to “alias” to your hosted MIDAS system.
  2. Make a small DNS change on your organization’s domain using the information provided in the addon
  3. Confirm that you’ve made your DNS change

Once your changes become active, you’ll be able to access your hosted MIDAS system via your chosen domain alias.

For more information about this optional addon for cloud-hosted customers, please visit: https://mid.as/domain-alias

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Custom brand (white label) a MIDAS system

Filed Under: Development, News, Releases by midas — Leave a comment
July 12, 2021

We’re excited to announce our new “Custom Branding” addon for MIDAS room booking systems (v4.28+).

Our new optional “Custom Branding” addon allows you to completely re-brand our software. This allows you to create a “white-label” software edition in which you can apply your own branding.

Visible traces of the word “MIDAS” can be removed, along with the MIDAS logo, links to the MIDAS website, and more. In their place, you can give the booking software your own bespoke name, logo, and icon.

A custom branded MIDAS login screen
A custom branded MIDAS login screen

An extensive range of customization options are available through the Custom Branding addon. These provide extended control over your booking system’s appearance:

Custom Branding / White Label Settings
Custom Branding / White Label Settings

The new Custom Branding addon also allows easy modification of any of the included “language packs” in MIDAS too. This means that you can completely customize all the wording and phrasing used throughout the software.

Moreover, the Custom Branding addon is available for both self-hosted and cloud-hosted editions of MIDAS.

For more information about the new Custom Branding addon, please visit https://mid.as/custom-branding

If you’re a cloud-hosted MIDAS customer, you may also be interested in our new “Domain Alias” addon. This addon compliments our “Custom Branding” addon. The Domain Alias addon allows you to make it appear that your hosted MIDAS system is in fact running on your own domain!

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Web Calendar Improvements

Filed Under: Development by midas — Leave a comment
July 9, 2021

A range of optional addons are available for our MIDAS room booking software.

One of our most popular addons is the “Web Calendars” addon.

This addon generates customizable monthly overview calendars of your room bookings, which can be seamlessly embedded directly into your own website to allow visitors to see what’s on.

Here’s an example of an embeddable Web Calendar using live data from our free online public demo:

Each calendar’s settings and appearance may be configured. You can, for instance, limit a Web Calendar to only show bookings from certain rooms, or that are of a certain booking type.

Since our Web Calendars addon first launched, we’ve had lots of positive feedback from customers. We’ve also had suggestions of how the Web Calendars addon could be improved to better meet specific needs.

Well, we’ve listened, and so for v1.38 of the Web Calendars addon (available for MIDAS v4.28+) we’ve added some exciting new features!

Web Calendar addon settings in MIDAS
Web Calendar addon settings in MIDAS

NEW: Embed single day Web Calendars

You can now embed a Web Calendar for a single day’s bookings into your website. Here’s an example of Web Calendar showing today’s bookings using live data from our public demo:

NEW: Allow visitors to book/request a date directly from a Web Calendar

One of the settings you can configure for each Web Calendar is what happens when someone clicks on a date or a booking. Until now, the only options available were:

  • Do Nothing
  • Show extended info for the selected date in a popup
  • Show extended info for the selected booking in a popup

Additionally, you can now also select:

  • Request this date
  • Book this date

If “Request this date” is selected and someone clicks on a date in a monthly Web Calendar, they’ll be taken to the Public Booking Request screen with their selected date pre-selected.

Similarly, for the “Book this date” option, the visitor will be taken to the Public Web Booking screen with their selected date pre-selected.

IMPROVED: Web Calendars can now be referenced by name

The Web Calendars addon can generate multiple embeddable calendars for you. To choose which calendar to embed, you’d previously have to pass its numeric reference number in a URL parameter.

We’ve now made this more user-friendly, by allowing Web Calendars to be referenced by name.

So for example, if you create a Web Calendar and name it “TestCal”, you can embed it by simply appending “?calendar=TestCal” to your Web Calendar URL.

IMPROVED: Setup/Breakdown times can now be included in Web Calendars

Setup/Breakdown periods were first introduced to MIDAS in v4.23. Until now, however, this information couldn’t be displayed on Web Calendars… well now it can! We’ve added support for additional placeholder “variables” in your Web Calendar templates to allow you to include setup and breakdown times or lengths!

Find out more about the new and improved Web Calendars addon for MIDAS at https://mid.as/web-calendars

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SPF record checking in cloud hosted MIDAS systems

Filed Under: Development by midas — Leave a comment
July 8, 2021

Our support team often receive emails from customers who are having trouble receiving email from their hosted MIDAS booking system.

We have a useful “Why am I not receiving email from my MIDAS system?” article in our extensive Knowledge Base. Its purpose is to help users resolve common email deliverability issues.

Now, assuming email settings are correct in a customer’s MIDAS system, then the most likely cause is a missing or incorrect SPF record for their organization’s own domain.

What is SPF?

SPF stands for “Sender Policy Framework”. Its purpose is to prevent unauthorized sending of email purporting to be from someone within your organization.

It’s function is best explained with an example…

Let’s assume that your cloud-hosted MIDAS system resides at “demo.mid.as”, and your own organization’s own domain is “example.com”.

You may wish your MIDAS system to be able to send emails appearing from “[email protected]” even when your booking system is hosted at another domain (i.e. demo.mid.as).

However, if an SPF record has not been correctly configured on your “example.com” domain to authorize “demo.mid.as” to send email on behalf of your organization’s own domain, emails sent from your MIDAS system will likely not arrive.

In a previous article we explain the importance of SPF in more detail. That article also covers how to correctly set an SPF record for MIDAS email delivery.

Anyway, back to email settings in MIDAS itself. Email settings may be configured via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Email.

Email settings and SMTP Test button in MIDAS
Email settings and SMTP Test button in MIDAS.

When choosing to have outgoing email sent via your organization’s own SMTP (mail) server, an “SMTP Test” button is shown. This allows you to send a test email to yourself using the SMTP settings you’ve entered.

SPF Record Check

Starting with MIDAS v4.28, we’ve added an SPF record check into this SMTP test for cloud hosted customers.

This will attempt to retrieve the SPF record for your domain. You’ll see a warning if the SPF record not been correctly configured to authorize your MIDAS system to send email on behalf of your organization.

We hope this check will assist our cloud-hosted customers in setting up an SPF record for their domain to ensure maximum email deliverability.

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