Scifeon is a development platform that you can use for creating highly customized data management systems for your lab.
The customization can be done at many different levels, from web-based configuration of the system through simple scripting to complex server- and client-side components. You can also add your own tables, columns and views to the database. The customization features are also integrated with a DevOps setup that enables you to automatically test and deploy updates so that new functionality can be deployed quickly and safely.
Customization of the system to fit your workflows is critical to successfully realizing the potential benefits of better data management. If the system does not match your lab data to the system – typically involving a lot of manual copying-and-pasting of data and manual processing in various tools, such as spreadsheets and analysis tools.
You can save a lot of time, improve data quality and ensure data traceability with a tailored system.
We believe that system customization is best done by people close to the end user – for example, scientists with programming skills, in-house IT staff or local consultants. These are the people most familiar with your particular workflows, and they can act quickly.
We don’t try to force feed a lot of consulting activities as part of a Scifeon implementation.
The Scifeon architecture can be visualized as a set of layers:
There are several different ways of customizing Scifeon, all through custom apps created for your organization:
We provide a DevOps infrastructure as part of the platform. You can use GitHub or another cloud version control system for your source code. And then our DevOps framework (based on Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services) can automatically run the tests in your app and deploy to test and production systems.
You can download the Scifeon SDK (software development kit) and run the entire Scifeon system (including web and database server) on your own Windows or Linux computer. Once the source code is pushed to a cloud Git repository, the DevOps system takes care of deployment to your Azure-based instance.
We can host Scifeon for you in Microsofts Azure cloud environment - or you can install it on-premises on your own servers
Cloud-based hosting of Scifeon is single-tenant, i.e. a separate web-server and database for each organization. Thus, you can have full access to the database.
Scifeon consists of the following main components
Essentially, what you can do through the user interface, can be done though the HTTP/JSON based API. This gives endless opportunities to integrate Scifeon into other systems - or integrate other systems into Scifeon.
For development support, we supply
If you prefer to host your production environment on-premises, you can still benefit from running test and staging instances in the cloud and delivering updates through the DevOps pipeline.