After a great and productive workshop that has taken place in Germany from 31st of May to the 2nd of June, Riding Bytes and Naralabs agreed on a roadmap to bring the next important key functionalities into the SENAITE project.
We believe that end user documentation is one of the major keystones in an open source project and one of the major drivers to increase the acceptance and the distribution of the Project. Therefore, we want to provide a dedicated website where non-technical, end-user oriented documentation will reside. It will be build with multilanguage support and community users will be able to easily contribute to the creation, modification and translation of this documentation. Furthermore, we believe that this site will engage new users, contributors and adopters.
To go even further on this idea, we’ve been explored ways to deliver context-aware documentation right inside senaite. As we thought further about this, we want to provide and add-on that integrates the context-aware documentation within Senaite LIMS. senaite.companion add-on will rely on the information stored in the dedicated documentation website, so it will always deliver from there. As such, this add-on will also encourage contributors to write high-quality documentation.
We want to help labs to present their results with the quality they deserve, they have to look nice. We feel is time to give an answer to the requests for a more sophisticated reporting system. senaite.impress add-on will streamline the whole process with the challenging task of web printings and international paper formats support. We think this new publication engine is capable to fully replace the existing one already in the 1.3.x series of Senaite LIMS.
We realized that the existing reports are not enough to get insights about performance, productivity and quality within the lab internal processes. Every lab needs to aggregate, export and display data in a particular way to fit their own needs. Because we also think this is one of the most important business-related topics a lab needs to address, we want to provide a tool to extract the data out of the LIMS in a totally configurable way. senaite.databox will address exactly this need: data extraction, grouping, aggregation and export. With all these features, we think this tool will superseed the functionalities currently provided under “Reports” section in the 1.3.x series of Senaite LIMS.
With these additions we strongly believe SENAITE will go one step further towards of being a configurable rather than a customizable system.