Whereas sample specification in Bika 1.0 LIMS was wine laboratory specific and only customisable in the source code, a through-the-web schema editor in Bika 1.1 enables the creation of custom sample types to meet cross industry requirements. Schema editors, accessible from Bika's management panel, were also added for order attributes and client and contact configuration

A 'How to use the Bika schema editor' has been published at www.bikalabs.com to assist laboratories in using it

Further customisation and developments for micro-biological, food and health laboratory requirements are currently being discussed with local and international prospects and partners on the Bika community site

With version 1.1, Bika also migrates to Plone 2.1, offering laboratories access to extensive content management capabilities and provides easy document management for client, laboratory or management purposes

Performance is another focus of the release – many optimisations throughout the code base were made for a noticeable improvement in performance

With Plone 2.1, Bika moves onto the long awaited Zope 2.8 application server and Zope object database ZODB 3.4. ZODB 3.4 has multi version concurrency control (MVCC) support, very important for high-traffic Zope sites. This should dramatically improve Bika's performance when used by many users concurrently

The Bika 1.1 update includes:

• Plone 2.1 compatibility

• Schema editors

• Performance enhancements

• Late analysis alerts

• Analyses hyper-linked to job cards on requests

• Dutch, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish translations contributed by Joris Goudriaan, Pierpaolo Baldan, Nuno R. Pinhão and Luis Espinoza
  

Download Bika 1.1 and technical release notes: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=145464

Bika LIMS open source community: http://bika.sourceforge.net

Schema Editor 'How to' documentation: http://www.bikalabs.com/manual/bikalimsschemaeditorhowto.pdf/download

For more information about Bika Lab Systems, sponsor and official service provider for the Bika LIMS, please visit http://www.bikalabs.com

Global implementation and support: http://www.bikalabs.com

Implementation and support in India: http://www.efenp.com

The Bika Team

This is an on-line copy of our quarterly newsletter distributed today. If you wish to receive future copies by e-mail, please send a request to subscribe@bikalabs.com