Professional Open Source LIMS · Bika Mail 6
POS. The Beekeeper model. Bika LIMS 2, Interlab, Calendar, Health and more
Dear Reader,
Our best festive wishes for a prosperous and fulfilling new year! It feels like yesterday. Our previous newsletter was distributed in March. We started writing this one soon after... should have done better but must've been too busy, the evidence:
In this copy
Why LIMS? The benefits of professional open source LIMS
Development news: Interlab · LIMS 2 Inkosi · Bika Calendar · Bika Health
Why LIMS? A Business Case
Lab managers and analysts love Bika and easily see how web based LIMS automation improve productivity and customer satisfaction while reducing turnaround time, human error, admin tasks and the paper chase. It's more difficult reaching decision makers with the cost benefits
From experience and on-line research, we set out to present them with a business case. The proprietary nature of LIMS texts made quantitative measurement impossible, but a thorough guide for lab use surfaced. It is dynamic and will be updated here
On the laboratory side, alarmingly, 3 percent is the smallest error predicted for manual data transcription, and bigger errors were measured
More information is available in the transparent Open Source movement and an indisputable case made. We discovered an excellent article on POS, the Professional Open Source business model, The Beekeeper by James Dixon of Pentaho. Paraphrased:
There is much media coverage and water-cooler talk about open source software and professional open source companies but these are so new that many people have misconceptions about how they work. In almost all cases I think people underestimate the potential of the POS business model but also how it differs from that for proprietary software.
POS combines traditional OSS projects run by a community of software enthusiasts and users with a professional company. The community adds strong support and world wide adoption of the software, while the company backs the project with full-time engineering staff and formal contracts sponsored by fee-paying customers
Customers benefit from the increased quality of the software and design, and increased traction enabled by the product's community. It is powerful because the customers, partners, engineers, and open source communities are all self-motivated in ways that are beneficial to themselves and, as a side effect, to all
For the avid reader there's the seminal and widely referenced Why OSS? Look at the numbers! by David Wheeler, providing quantitative data by various measures to prove that open source software presents a reasonable or superior approach
Development news
We had more than our share of delays in 2007. In the end it turned out for the better. We have stronger in-house development skills and partners, we are on our own server cluster with capacity to spare. We are releasing more frequently and with Bika LIMS 2 nearing completion, we are catching up fast
Our proficiency testing LIMS, Bika Interlab, has been released as version 1.2 after an upgrade and v 1.0 coming thorough a period in production at sponsors SAWLA. More information, downloads, at the Interlab project page. Try the on-line demo. Mavericks go ahead and install yourself!
To accommodate Bika Interlab and improve performance, there was a minor but very popular release of Bika LIMS 1.2.5
An alpha version of upcoming feature rich Bika LIMS 2 'Inkosi' - The Chief - was made available for evaluation in August and has been updated since. It is currently being readied for a parallel run at sponsors Quantum Analytical Services. We burned fingers with release dates before,-) Stay tuned
Inkosi includes Bika Calendar, a true working hours calendar for accurate late analysis alerts and turn-around reporting. It will be released as stand-alone, hopefully finding homes and further enhancement in other Plone projects. Watch that space, at the Software Centre
Advanta Labs sponsored the design of the Patient demographics module for our LIMS project for medical laboratories, Bika Health, being started up. It inherits full Inkosi functionality and we will be integrating more instruments
Bika Health discussion group
We are drawing much interest and offers of help for getting Bika Health developed and we would like to co-ordinate the project better. We are setting up a Google group to discuss requirements and plans. We would really appreciate your input. Please sign up at Bika-Health via the Apply for group membership link. Since mail is distributed from members only, there is little potential for spam
On the podium
Yes we do get from behind our monitors sometimes! April, in Cape Town, we introduced Bika Health at an OpenMRS Implementers group meeting.
OpenMRS is a leading open source medical record management system with big footprint
in Africa. We since adopted the OpenMRS patient demographics data model
In May we presented a case study based on Bika Interlab, 'From paper to web - Proficiency testing at the SA Wine Laboratory Association', at the 3rd Annual Laboratory Management Conference in Johannesburg
More recently, in September, we did 'Your laboratory, Open Source Software and the Internet' at a workshop by the SA Spectroscopic Society in Saldanha. This was particularly well received and introduced many labs to open source alternatives
Bikalabs.org. The Bika Foundation
From time to time companies get exposed for not releasing their software to the general public while posing as 'open source' for marketing benefits. That was never the case with Bika. Quite the opposite, till this day we do not know where most of the near 10 000 downloads have gone, and we speculate that the .com moniker inhibits participation by some OSS enthusiasts. There are currently 87 subscribers to the Bika user list and 20 to the developers list
Thus far we used the Sourceforge infrastructure to administer the project but need to separate Bika commercial from community activities more clearly along the model offered by MySQL.com and .org
- Bikalabs.org, becomes home to the Bika community, a distributed software laboratory with the objective to develop LIMS software and co-ordinate the Bika open source project. In due time, this is being evolved into the fully fledged Bika foundation
- Bikalabs.com remains the domain of Bika Lab Systems, the registered company providing LIMS implementations and support to analytical labs
To better facilitate the Bikalabs.org 'brand', we'll create a new site with more functionality for participation. If you are interested, please email us your suggestions. Apart from software development and design inputs, contributions to the Help Center, like Movies, Manuals, How-tos and FAQ's will be great
Bika CMS · Plone hosting and content management systems
With expertise, server capacity to spare and demand increasing, Bika now offers stand-alone Plone hosting, web content management services and add-ons such as Plone Gazette, integrated at Bikalabs.com and used to aggregate this newsletter. More here
Bika Blog
We like the direct, less formal communication that is sweeping the net and Joris started a Bika blog at http://bikablog.blogspot.com/. The main discussions flow around Bika and open source software and there should be regular posts, but for fear of being completely uninteresting, we try keeping posts to worthwhile topics (ahum)
Best regards
The Bika team
Bika Interlab released · Web-based proficiency testing software. more...
SAWLA Interlab upgraded · Bika Interlab 1.2 successfully rolled out
at upgrade sponsors SAWLA. more...
Bika CMS · Plone hosting and web content management systems · With growing expertise, servers to spare and
responding to increasing demand, Bika now brings stand-alone Plone
hosting and CMS services actively to market. more...
Alpha testing Bika LIMS 2 under way · Bika LIMS 2 Inkosi available as alpha test version for early evaluation
and feedback. It came through initial in-house
testing with flying colours. more...
Bika Health project starts · Customising our open
source LIMS for health laboratory implementation has started. more...
Plone the best overall Web CMS? · Reinout van Rees blogged the
exponential rise and diversity in the number of Plone sites and
providers and Plone came out tops in a study of 40 CMS products at CMSwatch.com. more...
Bika 3rd Lab Management Conference presentation · more...
Mining Weekly on Bika Fire Assay · An article on Bika Fire Assay published on 23 March 2007 in Mining Weekly announces Bika's entry to the geology and mining sector. more...
Press Release: Bika LIMS 2.1 Inkosi open source release
