Posts Tagged: v4.16

MIDAS v4.16 Out Now!

We love bringing new and improved features to MIDAS throughout the course of the year, and our latest update v4.16 is no exception!

If you frequent our website, blog, or social media channels, you’ll likely already be aware of some of the exciting improvements we’ve been busy working on for this update, but we’re now excited to announce the release of MIDAS v4.16!

Here’s What’s New & Improved in v4.16:

How To Get MIDAS v4.16…

New To MIDAS?

We are committed to fair and accessible pricing for all organizations regardless of size. We’re totally upfront and transparent about our pricing structure, and you can purchase MIDAS v4.16 securely through our website and be up and running in no time!

“Self Hosted” Customers:

Self-Hosted customers with ongoing Annual Support Subscriptions will be able to update to v4.16 in the next few days. It only takes a couple of clicks – simply log in to your MIDAS system and go to MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Update

“Cloud Hosted” Customers:

Cloud-Hosted customers don’t need to do anything! – All our active Cloud-Hosted MIDAS customers have now been automatically updated to the latest version of MIDAS!

We love hearing from our customers, so let us know what features you’d like to see in future updates to our software by voting on our feature request page!


Privacy Improvements

We care about privacy, which is why we’re introducing “Do-Not-Track” support in our forthcoming update, MIDAS v4.16.

“Do-Not-Track” – or DNT – is a setting present in most modern web browsers. If enabled, it instructs the web servers not to track you. This can mean not to track your visit, or not to tailor advertising based on your browsing habits, etc.

More and more websites are increasingly respecting this user privacy preference – but it’s fair to say that the vast majority still don’t.

As DNT is a voluntary standard, not all websites or online services have agreed to honor it. Even among those that have, not all have implemented the standard in the same way. Therefore, the effectiveness of DNT can vary depending on the website or service you are visiting.

Now, Ordinarily, the “Recent Activity” log in MIDAS – which records all user activity taking place in your scheduling system – also logs each user’s IP address.

Do Not Track (dnt) Support in MIDAS
Do Not Track (dnt) Support in MIDAS

For v4.16 we’re introducing a new “Honor user’s Do Not Track preference?” setting.

If enabled by an administrator, MIDAS won’t log user’s IP addresses in its Recent Activity log if the user has also enabled the “Do-Not-Track” setting in their browser.


New Quick Tour of the User Interface

One of the things we’re really proud of is the extensive sources of help we make available to our customers.

This includes complete both online help documentation and downlodable and printable manuals (in PDF format). We also have a host of easy to follow, step-by-step video tutorials. Furthermore, we’ve complied an extensive Knowledge Base containing answers to many common questions.

In the addition to this wealth of self-help resources, for the forthcoming release of MIDAS v4.16, we’re also adding an optional “Quick Tour” of the user interface within MIDAS itself:

Optional Quick Tour upon first login

Upon the very first login by a user to MIDAS, they’ll be presented with an option to take a quick tour.

Quick Tour of the Booking Information Panel

The Quick Tour will outline all the key elements to their MIDAS screen, which they can step through at their own pace.

Quick Tour of the Manage MIDAS settings

The tour will also describe the function of each toolbar icon that’s available to the user.

Additional Sources of Help

The Quick Tour can be closed at any point, and won’t be shown again the next time the user logs in.

Initially, the Quick Tour will only be available to new users running MIDAS under one of the English language variations. It will also only be shown on Tablet, Laptop, or Desktop devices. It won’t currently be shown on very small mobile device screens.


Improvements in Importing Data

We’ve made a number of improvements for the upcoming v4.16 release of our MIDAS software when it comes to importing data from 3rd party calendars/booking systems, namely:

1) Faster importing of CSV data

We’ve managed to significantly improve the import speed of CSV data, which in previous versions could become very slow/sluggish depending upon a combination of settings in MIDAS and the amount of data being imported

2) Improved CSV support

MIDAS v4.16 now better handles instances where CSV data fields themselves contained a record delimiting character.

For example, take the following CSV (Comma Separated Values) line:

Item 1,Item 2,Item 3,"Item 4a, Item 4b",Item 5

Previously MIDAS would incorrectly analyze the 4th item as being two separate data items, “Item 4a” and “Item 4b”, instead of a single data record.

This behavior is now corrected when importing data into MIDAS v4.16.

3) Support for importing bookings with resources

Until now, whilst you could import bookings into MIDAS, it was not possible to “map” data – including resources – to the resources database within MIDAS.

We’ve addressed this for v4.16 and you can import resources along within your booking data.

To be able to import resources along with your bookings, you’ll need to ensure that your resource data falls within a single “column” in your CSV data file. MIDAS will then parse this data and attempt to determine the applicable resource and quantity.

For example, if you wish to import a booking which has two laptops and one data projector assigned to it, your CSV data field for this should be in one of the following supported formats:

  • “2 Laptop, 1 Projector”
  • “2 Laptop; 1 Projector”
  • “x2 Laptop, x1 Projector”
  • “x2 Laptop; x1 Projector”
  • “2x Laptop, 1x Projector”
  • “2x Laptop; 1x Projector”
  • “2No. Laptop, 1No. Projector”
  • “2No. Laptop; 1No. Projector”

Click here to continue reading about some of the other new & improved features coming in MIDAS v4.16!