Posts Tagged: templates

New Booking Feedback Email & Template

Over the past few articles, we’ve unvailed some of the new features in the next update (v4.24) to our MIDAS room and resource scheduling software.

In this article we’re revealing a new email notification. This notification can be configured to automatically send to your clients shortly after their bookings have concluded.

Those familiar with the extensive email notification capabilities of MIDAS will know that you can already configure MIDAS to automatically send clients a variety of notifications. These include; booking confirmations, reminders of their upcoming bookings, invoice payment reminders and more. In fact there are no fewer than 10 different email notification types available in MIDAS. Each of these may be individually customizable through the use of templates.

Send a post-booking email to your clients

For v4.24 we’re adding in an additional email notification template to the list – for “Booking Feedback”. The idea behind this is as follows. A short time after a client’s booking has taken place, MIDAS can automatically send them a courtesy follow-up email. This could simply thank them for their visit. It could also invite them to leave feedback on their room hire experience at your organization.

New Booking Feedback email template in MIDAS
New “Booking Feedback” email template in MIDAS v4.24

As with all other editable templates in MIDAS, the new “Booking Feedback” template may be modified and customized to your particular requirements. Templates are accessed and modified via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Templates. Your templates may be customized to include simple HTML code and placeholder variables.

As a side note, eagle-eyed viewers may also note from the above screenshot that we’ve also now made the Template Preview and Template Code areas vertically resizable! Previously these were both a fixed height.

Once you’ve customized your “Booking Feedback” email template, you can then enable it. You can set how long after a client’s booking has concluded MIDAS should wait before sending the email. These settings may be configured via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Scheduled Tasks.

Enable a Scheduled Task to automatically send an email to a client after their visit
Enable a Scheduled Task to automatically email a client after their visit

For these post-booking emails to be automatically sent, you’ll need to have Scheduled Tasks configured on your server. If Scheduled Tasks are correctly configured, the “Last Run” time indicated in the above screenshot should show a time within the last 60 minutes. All our cloud-hosted customer’s MIDAS systems are pre-configured to run scheduled tasks. For self-hosted customers, if you’ve not yet configured Scheduled Tasks on your server, please refer to our KB article: How to configure your server to run Scheduled Tasks.

We hope our customers will appreciate this new notification and template addition to the forthcoming v4.24 update. In our next article, we’ll look at how the functionality of this new feature can be further enhanced with a brand-new optional addon. So stay tuned to our blog to discover more in the coming days!


More Flexible Email Templates

The next update to our Web Based Room Booking and Resource Scheduling software MIDAS is fast approaching, and throughout March we’re giving you a first look at some of the new features and improvements you can look forward to in MIDAS v4.12..

A growing selection of templates are available and editable within MIDAS, allowing you to customize and tailor the appearance of various parts of the software, as well as printouts and emails.

Templates are constructed using a combination of common HTML code and special MIDAS variables – don’t worry if you’re not familiar with HTML, we’re produced a handy “What is HTML and how do I use it within my MIDAS templates?” guide, complete with simple examples.

MIDAS also includes a visual WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) template editor where you can simply drag/drop/insert elements into your templates, rather than entering raw HTML code.

Since the introduction of templates, email templates in particular contained a special %CONTENT% variable. This variable would be automatically substituted for generated content when an email was sent. For example, here’s some simplified content for a Booking Confirmation email template in MIDAS v4.11:

Dear %CLIENT_FIRSTNAME%,
Details of your confirmed booking at %DATABASE% are as follows:
%CONTENT%
We look forward to seeing you then!

In the above template, when a booking confirmation email is sent, the variable %CLIENT_FIRSTNAME% is automatically substituted with the forename of the client the notification is to be sent to and %DATABASE% is be substituted for the name of your MIDAS database (usually your organization’s name).

The %CONTENT% variable is then replaced with details of the client’s bookings, and would include the booking fields that had been selected via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Fields → Show In → Booking Confirmation.

Using the above template, the resulting email content may look like:

Dear Joe,
Details of your confirmed booking at St James are as follows:

Date/Times: 21/03/2016 @ 09:00 – 10:30
Venue: Room 1
Resources: x1 Laptop, x1 Data Projector

Date/Times: 21/03/2016 @ 09:00 – 10:30
Venue: Room 2
Resources: x4 Tables, x20 Chairs

We look forward to seeing you then!

For MIDAS v4.12, we’ve overhauled email templates to give you far greater flexibility and control over the generated content of emails. The rigid %CONTENT% variable has been replaced with more useful variables. For example, a new booking confirmation email template may now look like this:

Dear %CLIENT_FIRSTNAME%,
Details of your confirmed booking at %DATABASE% are as follows:

<bookings>
Dates/Times: %START% – %FINISH%
Venue: %VENUE%
Resources: %RESOURCES%
</bookings>

We look forward to seeing you then!

…as you can see, the original %CONTENT% variable has been replaced in v4.12 with a <bookings> … </bookings> section, in which you can add your own text and variables to customize the generated content exactly as you’d like. You can also include content from any custom booking fields you’ve added to MIDAS – for example, if you’ve created a booking field named “Test Field”, you can insert the variable %CUSTOM_TEST_FIELD% into the <bookings> … </bookings> section. (This brings email templates in line with the format of templates in our optional Digital Signage and Web Calendars addons, which have always supported <bookings> … </bookings> template sections)

We’ve also added support for a couple of new variables too; %BOOKING_COST% and %TOTAL_COST%.

%BOOKING_COST% can be added within the <bookings> … </bookings> section and will be substituted for the cost of the individual booking (including both venue and resource usage).

%TOTAL_COST% can be added anywhere in the template and will be substituted for the total cost of all the bookings listed in the email.

When editing templates via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Templates, a complete list is displayed of all available variables that can be inserted into the current templates.

We believe replacing the limited %CONTENT% variable with a flexible <bookings> … </bookings> section in email notifications will give customers far greater control over the appearance and content of emails sent through MIDAS.

MIDAS v4.12 is expected to be made available to Beta Testers later this month, with a general release shortly after. We’re currently looking for additional testers to help test and provide feedback/bug reports on pre-release versions of our software. Becoming a tester is free and no experience is required, and what’s more we’ll reward you for your participation! Find out more about becoming a MIDAS Beta Tester here.

If you would like to be notified when v4.12 is fully released, then why not join our Mailing List?

Template Improvements for v4.07

The next substantial update to our popular web based room booking and resource scheduling software is just around the corner, and so throughout this month, we’re outlining some of the new features and improvements you can expect to see in the upcoming v4.07 release….

This post covers some of the improvements coming to the customizable “Templates” within MIDAS.

A range of customizable templates has been available to administrators for some time (ever since v3.12, way back in May 2011) via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Templates. v4.07 sees a number of improvements to these templates…

New MIDAS Email Templates
New MIDAS Email Templates

More Flexible Email Templates

List of Templates In previous releases, there has been a single customizable email template which was applied to all outgoing emails sent through your scheduling system. For v4.07, we’ve extended the number of email templates to NINE!

You’ll now be able to modify separate email templates for booking confirmations, booking reminders, invoice reminders, invoice overdue notifications, booking request submitted/approved/rejected notifications, as well as the original “general” email template for all other emails.

You’ll also be able to customize the subject field of most of these emails templates too!

 


More Variables

To accompany the many new templates available in v4.07, we’re also introducing a range of new “variables” which can be inserted into your template code to provide even more flexibility.

For example, a new %CLIENT_FIRSTNAME% variable has been introduced alongside the previous %CLIENT% variable to allow your emails to be more informal by using the client’s first name instead of their full name.

A whole host of new invoicing variables have also been introduced including, %INVOICEDUEDATE%, %INVOICEDUEIN%, %INVOICEOVERDUEBY%, and %INVOICETERMS%, as well as new variables giving you far greater control over the “Invoice To” section of your invoices.

The previous %INVOICETO% variable (which includes the client’s name, organization, postal address and email address) can be broken down into smaller parts through the use of the new variables %INVOICETO_CLIENT%, %INVOICETO_ORG%, %INVOICETO_ADDRESS%, and %INVOICETO_EMAIL%


Visual Template Editing

The other big improvement for templates in v4.07 is the ability to edit your templates “visually” in the “Template Preview” area as well as manually in the “Template Code” area.

You can now type, copy, cut, paste, and move items around in the “Template Preview” area, and MIDAS will automatically generate updated template code from your edits.


Reset Templates

Messed up a template and want to start again? Each template within MIDAS can now be reset to its standard factory default.


Customize the Web Request and Pay Online templates further with your own .css Style Sheets

External Custom CSS We’re also giving you even more control over the “look and feel” of your “Public Booking Request” and “Pay Online” screens by allowing you to specify your own external .css Style Sheets that will override the default theme your MIDAS is running in when these pages are displayed.


MIDAS v3.12 is here!

We are pleased to announce the release of MIDAS v3.12!

To coincide with this new version, we’re also excited to be releasing a new edition of MIDAS, “MIDAS Lite”!

MIDAS Lite is a scaled down edition of MIDAS. It’s aimed at those who don’t require all the features of the full edition and those on tighter budgets.

There are lots of exciting new features in MIDAS v3.12 too! Notably, the ability to accept public booking requests for your rooms. There’s a host of other features including customizable print, email, and invoice templates, booking confirmations, and selective restore from backups

We’ve also updated our Video Tutorials section with three new video tutorials. There’s now over an hour’s worth of step-by-step video guides now available!

New Features in v3.12

If you’re an existing MIDAS user with a current Annual Support Package, you can upgrade to v3.12 right now! Simply login to your MIDAS, click the “MIDAS Admin Options” icon and select “Manage MIDAS -> Update”. If your Annual Support Package has recently expired, don’t worry – you can quickly renew it at https://mid.as/renew

If you’re new to MIDAS, you can check out fully-functional demos of both MIDAS and MIDAS Lite RIGHT HERE. To get MIDAS working for YOUR company/organization, head over to https://mid.as/pricing to get yourself a copy of the new MIDAS v3.12!

UPDATE: As from 1st August 2012, MIDAS Lite is no longer available, as our pricing has been restructured to make the full edition of MIDAS available starting from MIDAS Lite prices! [Read More]