Monday, September 29, 2008

Bika Health @ Global LIS Conference in Hanoi, Vietnam

Bika Health and it's newly formed foundation were represented in the Global LIS Conference held in Hanoi, Vietnam from the 23rd to the 26th of September, by Lemoene Smit, Project Manager and CEO of Bika Lab Systems and Director of the Bika Health Foundation.

More info and a copy of the delivered presentation will be posted in the next week or so on Bikalabs.com, but here already a shot of our stand.


By all accounts, it was a great success!

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Easy Setup file for Bika 2.1 Inkosi on Windows XP & Vista

I want to make everybody out there aware who wants to try Bika LIMS 2.1 'Inkosi' on their Windows XP or Windows Vista machine, that there is now an easy install file (executable) for Bika LIMS, the only pre-requisite is to have Plone 2.5.5 installed. The executable was created by our partners at the University of Costa Rica, to which we, at Bika Lab Systems, owe many thanks!

Here the original mail and link copied in (originally posted on the Bika Developer Mailing List):

Recently we made an executable file that installs Bika LIMS 2.1 Inkosi directly in Windows XP (and Windows Vista) without having to change anything to have it running. The only requirement is that Plone 2 has to be installed in 'C:/Program Files/Plone 2/', but maybe later we can make an installation file that checks the plone 2 path and install bika according to it. In the meanwhile here is this file, maybe it can be helpful to someone, greetings.
Bika LIMS 2.1 Inkosi Setup
--
Andrés Oreamuno.
Centro de Investigación en Contaminación Ambiental
Universidad de Costa Rica

This news and the file will soon also appear on our website

Installation Notes:
Once you've run the set-up programme, you need to run the IDServer and Zope. Go to Zope Management Interface and add a new Plone Site, with Extension Profile 'bika'. And you should be up and running!

Friday, May 30, 2008

Release Time for Bika LIMS 2.1 & Bika Calendar 1.0

Yes, we're finally there. It's release time.

We have released two new products early this week;
Bika LIMS 2.1 'Inkosi'; the latest and much improved version of our generic Laboratory Information Management System solution.
Bika Calendar 1.0; A stand-alone Plone product, that we use as an add-on to Bika LIMS to create a true working hours calendar.

Here links to Downloads and Project Pages;

You might also see us appear in various on-line media, as on the following project websites; Plone.org (LIMS, Calendar), Freshmeat.net (LIMS) and Sourceforge.net and of course on Bikalabs.com

Here also the official Press Release (which will be released early next week):

Web-based laboratory information management · Bika LIMS 2.1 Inkosi open source release
Bika LIMS 2.1 Inkosi 'The Chief' is the next major public release of the professionally supported open source LIMS by Cape Town company Bika Lab Systems and was released 26 May 2008 on a general public license, free to download, install and use.
Popular first release of Bika - pronounced bheeka and meaning 'to report' in isiZulu - has been downloaded more than 12 500 times world wide and established Bika as leading open source LIMS.
Feature rich LIMS 2 promises to become true Inkosi to the global Bika community of users and developers. It is now in production locally and being piloted in Canada, Nigeria and Costa Rica.
Also in May, Bika hosted a fellow from CICA with the aim of further customisation and implementations in pesticide residue laboratories in Latin America. The scientific exchange was sponsored by the IAEA. A Spanish translation is nearing completion

Automation
Bika Inkosi offers a host of functional enhancements, a well developed quality control suite and more automation to further improve turnaround times and eliminate human error
Regularly requested analysis sets, analysis profiles, can now be ordered with the minimum of clicks and in bulk through import files
In the lab itself, once-off worksheet template creation circumvents laborious manual work sheet management. The templates include place holders for control and duplicate samples and can be configured to closely resemble instrument trays
Upon using a template, Inkosi populates worksheets with analyses closest to their due dates but these can be manually adjusted to requirement, before exporting them to instruments and recovering results without having to manually enter any data
Results proceed through the standard Bika web based workflow - validated against client and product specific specifications, verification and publication in the client's preferred media: email, fax, digitally signed print, SMS and export file
The process is assisted by a system of alerts, prompting role players of pending tasks. A true time calendar, taking non working hours into account, makes for accurate alerts and efficiency reports. Results remain securely archived on-line, accessible via a powerful Google-like live search engine

Quality Control
Bika LIMS 1 is successfully used in ISO 17025 accredited labs and Inkosi builds on this heritage with granular audit trails of samples, analyses, analysis requests, worksheets, orders, invoices, and web content edits, ensuring total traceability. Analysis and work sheet re-testing work flows are incorporated and logged
Quality Control measures include the maintenance of standards, stocks and suppliers, the use of blanks and duplicate samples, instrument calibrations and graphical reporting on trends, distribution curves, relative % error and inter-laboratory proficiency schemes

CMS - Web portal content management
Bika remains one of the few web based LIMS not held back by web enabled legacy design, but developed in the cutting edge and robust web server technologies the Internet originated on. Inkosi LIMS front end can be built up to provide valuable services to clients and staff as well as marketing material to prospects and anonymous visitors
Knowledge centres and news letter tools are just two products that easily integrate with the LIMS and literally hundreds more exist, developed in the community supporting Plone, the open source CMS Inkosi is built on

POS - the professional open source model adopted by Bika
There is much media coverage about open source software models but these are often misunderstood and its potential underestimated. POS combines traditional OSS projects run by a community of software enthusiasts with a professional company, Bika Lab Systems in the case of Inkosi. The community adds strong support and world wide adoption of the software, while Bika Lab Systems 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. 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

Future plans
Bika LIMS development is driven by client and community requirements, and if feedback from the current round of pilot projects bears fruit, complete instrument maintenance, batching, sample storage management and change request modules will be developed for release 4th quarter 2008. These will once more be best of breed designs discussed and improved in the Bika community forums. Ubuntu!

For more information please visit www.bikalabs.com. All enquiries welcome, info@bikalabs.com

Friday, March 7, 2008

For the Friday

Today I wanted to share an excellent presentation on the web.

It's called "The Brand Gap - How to bridge the distance between Business Strategy and Design", although it is not about open source, or even about software specifically. I found it very stimulating from a pure marketing point of view. Enjoy!

Friday, February 15, 2008

SaaS and further news on LIMS 2.0 'Inkosi' Training Material

SaaS:

As you probably know, Bika Lab Systems, has been offering hosted Bika LIMS, Wine & Interlab solutions since its inception, initially we used to call it 'hosted LIMS', then changed it to 'ASP' (Application Service Provision) as it was called at the time, but since last year the term SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) seems to have become the new buzzword.

What does SaaS mean?

Wikipedia puts it rather well:
Software as a service (SaaS) is a software application delivery model where a software vendor develops a web-native software application and hosts and operates (either independently or through a third-party) the application for use by its customers over the Internet. Customers do not pay for owning the software itself but rather for using it. They use it through an API accessible over the Web and often written using Web Services or REST. The term SaaS has become the industry preferred term, generally replacing the earlier terms Application Service Provider (ASP) and On-Demand.' (link to original wikipedia article)

In simple terms, it means that our web-based LIMS, is hosted from our servers (currently only based in Cape Town, South Africa, but soon in a city near you), where we offer all support services, first line support to the clients' users, technical support on the system and hardware, relieving the client of any investment in IT know-how which normally would be associated with a LIMS acquisition. You pay a set-up fee, monthly rental and a per usage fee.

What SaaS solutions are we currently offering?

- Bika LIMS 1.2 (or Bika Wine, for the beverages industry)
- Bika LIMS 2.0 (still for evaluation and assessment purposes, until we release a production ready version)
- Bika Interlab 1.2
If you are interested, and would like to know more about our pricing, drop me an email

We do not only offer SaaS, but also use open source web-based solutions on our own server, many of which are available as SaaS on the Web. I use SugarCRM for my sales and marketing initiatives, Lemoene uses dotProject for as his project management tool and is currently evaluating Projity Openproj. We tried out Trac, but have reverted to Roundup as issue tracker for our commercial clients, and of course use our Plone website as a central CMS & document repository. As you can see we practice what we preach!

If you are interested further in sales and marketing related discussions about SaaS and its trends, I can highly recommend the following Blog; SaaStream

LIMS 2.0 'Inkosi' Related

Training Material:
Manual: We already started working on the new LIMS 2.0 manual, although still w.i.p. (which it will be until final release), you can find it here
Training Videos: We have started this week with writing up the various story boards and plan to start production (of the stable parts of the system next week), and will populate in our HelpCenter, a new LIMS 2 Video section.

Software:
Demo: The LIMS 2 demo is continually updated, current version is 2.0.18, and next week we are going to upgrade it with QC reports and graphs.
Alpha evaluation release: Although not officially released, if you're interested I can send you the latest Bika LIMS 2.0 and Bika Calendar 1.0 packages, if you want to test it locally on your own server. Send me an email if you're keen.

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Happy New Year!

To start with, very belated best compliments of the season. Although I was planning to spend more attention over the holidays on this blog and other secondary marketing efforts, the new year started very quickly, on the 1st of January with setting up an evaluation system of LIMS 2.0 for a Canadian client. This will mean that when we release LIMS 2.0 or soon thereafter we will have substantial functionality to cater specifically for the North American markets. More about this in our next Bika Mail newsletter.

Looking for Python / Zope / Plone developers
Although we're hardly a month into the new year, business is going very well. We have a variety of projects on the go, and they are all in need to varying degrees of development. So if you're reading this and would like to work for a Professional Open Source company, you have expert skills in Python, Plone & Zope, can work autonomously, and like project based work; drop me an email.

New Laptop: HP 530
Due to an astray half-full glass of wine landing on my laptop, I ended up buying a new one, as the repairs I was quoted for came close to a new laptop anyway. After some research and looking for a budget priced laptop I found the HP 530, I got the dual-core version 1.8 Ghz with 2 Gb of RAM. It's a decent machine and have little to complain about the hardware....but on the software side I was perplexed. To start with when having made up my mind about buying a new laptop, I went straight to the Dell site and hoped to be able score a laptop with pre-installed Ubuntu. Well, they're not available (I hope: yet), which disappointed me considerably. So it's all talk and no action then!
When contacting various re-sellers in South Africa, I asked what discount I would get if they gave me the laptop without any MS software on it (be it XP, Vista or Office), and to my complete shock, they told me that they were not allowed to sell the laptop without MS Windows on it. And of course that meant no discount. But also no freedom of choice for the consumer. Maybe this is something the European competition court should be looking into ;-)
So, in the end I got it delivered within 48 hours, and thought what the heck, I want to see how Vista (basic) looks and feels like. The next disappointments were; after starting up the laptop it took more then 2 hours to install Vista, if you set yourself up as admin, you want to be an admin and not have irritating warnings that your are performing admin tasks continually, and the whole MS bundle (Vista + office) hogged an unbelievable 30 GB on my drive!!
So I went for a dual boot set-up with Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10. Installation of Gutsy took exactly 35 minutes. Now that's a proper OS! I also have full support for Compiz-Beryl, and although not enhancing productivity it is quite smooth and a good laugh (especially shaking windows ;-).
I messed the partitions options up a bit, so I went to try GParted, and I must say it's an unbelievably easy tool to use, works flawlessly and allows you to resize partitions to your heart's content.

New: Bika LIMS 2.0 Alpha testing updates
In order to keep various interested parties updated with development releases and updates to our LIMS 2.0 Alpha Demo, I am going to post a small news item on the Bikalabs.com website, starting this week with the first.

That's it for the first post of 2008, more exciting news coming in the weeks and months ahead. Stay tuned!