Bika, the LIMS

Bika Open Source portal at Sourceforge.net

Since releasing Bika on the GNU General Public License and making it available on-line in late August, we drew a fair amount of interest - Bika has been downloaded more than 500 times, and the project website has had over 8 000 hits already.

Bika Open Source Community

In the past two months first members joined the developers and user mailing lists to discuss future developments and implementation issues. If you wish to be part of the ongoing discussions, please join one of the mailing lists from the links provided at the bottom.

Bika Specifications Published

To obtain best practice procedures, we published specifications for planned Bika improvements with the kind consent of our clients at the Bika open source portal. Please offer your learned comment on:

ISO Accreditation: With thanks to BBK. Many laboratories strive for accreditation based on the technical requirements of the ISO/IEC standard 17025, 'General requirements for the competence of testing and calibration laboratories.' These are hefty standards and open to varied interpretation but ultimately implemented by local accreditation officers.

The purpose of this document is to invite discussion towards an internationally accepted specification. Current Bika measures improve on the ISO specification in many respects but some elements still need to be elaborated.

New Bika functionality:Sponsored by Quantum Analytical Services. New micro-biology functions, analysis request quotes and templates, client product specifications, control sample integration, accounts interfaces, efficiency reports and many more. This document features and integrated html wireframe to ease the assimilation of what is a substantial amount of information.

Bika Internationalisation 'How To'

We also published a 'How to Customise Bika to your preferred language' document, describing in 8 easy steps translating the Bika dictionary of LIMS terminology and implement it via your browser language setting. Through participation from the embryonic bika open source community, Dutch and Italian were added to Bika's standard Afrikaans and English translations already.

Future Plans

We expect to release Bika 1.2 soon, probably January 2006. This will include a migration to latest stable Zope and Plone versions and will bring about improved performance.

Bika Lab Systems

First LSP - LIMS Service Provision

Implementation of first Bika LSP installation at Cape Winelab is currently under way. This also involves full integration of their corporate website, offering Plone's web content management functionality on the same platform.

Authorised users edit their websites with an easy-to-use editor, as well as discuss, review and publish new pages and news items, schedule events and share private web folders as document repositories and back-ups.

A 'How To' document describing this customisation will be published shortly. The process will be automated and available as a customisation policy during Bika installation.

Partnerships

To resolve the demand for geographically distributed support, we are inviting qualified service providers to become part of our network. The invitation extends to suppliers who would want to see their lab instruments and LIMS related applications interfaced with Bika.

Newcomers enter as 'Bika Partners', the starting point of every collaboration. Bika Partners are responsible for sales & marketing in their territories, analysis & design, implementation and first level support. They are trained and backed up by Bika lab systems' technical support team.

Partners are regularly reviewed and on gaining experience, satisfactory track records and displaying the necessary skills levels for quality support, will be promoted to 'Accredited Bika Service Providers'.

We are proud to announce the appointment of our first partner, EFENP Automation, in Bangalore, providing solutions in the Indian food, pharmaceutical and cosmetics sectors.

Discussions are currently under way with interested parties in Hungary, New Zealand and the USA. We are also finalising the implementation of interfaces for the Bika Wine LIMS to vineyard and cellar management systems EzyWine and WineMS.

If you are interested in offering Bika's LIMS in your area, please contact our sales & marketing manager Joris Goudriaan at joris@bikalabs.com.

We wish you all of the best for the end-of-year break. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions about the Bika LIMS or Bika Lab Systems.

Best regards,

The Bika Team

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Bika's LSP offering http://www.bikalabs.com/bikaprod/asp

Bika open source portal http://bika.sourceforge.net/

Discussion documents:

ISO accreditation http://bika.sourceforge.net/accreditation/index.htm

New Bika functions http://bika.sourceforge.net/specs/index.htm

Join a Bika mailing list

Developers http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bika-developers

Users http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bika-users

Latest partner information http://www.bikalabs.com/partners/

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