Highly customizable
Highly customizable
Create customized laboratory data management systems with Scifeon
Customization can be done at many levels, from web-based system configuration to complex components. You can add your own tables, columns and views.
The customization features are also integrated with a DevOps setup enabling you to automatically test and deploy updates so that new functionality can be deployed quickly and safely.
System philosophy
Customization of Scifeon 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
The system foundation is a data management infrastructure and customization framework. These parts, together with the general data editing (CRUD) functionality are the most mature elements. We are currently focusing on building improved template support that enables web based system configuration of many features, and on the ELN and the Dashboard parts of the system. We have customized modules for managing FACS and MS (mass spectrometry) data. These can be used as examples or starting points for creating your own modules. We will gradually add more modules and better configuration support. Support for plate-based lab work (such as assays and molecular biology) is one of our current focus areas.
Developing add-ons
There are several different ways of customizing Scifeon, all through custom add-ons created for your organization: Templates for customization that do not require coding
JavaScript, TypeScript and HTML5 for web elements Custom database tables and views JavaScript/TypeScript for custom data processing Complete HTTP/JSON API coverage
Scifeon Components
Primary System
A database; the default is Microsoft SQL Server, but we are planning to add support for Oracle and PostgreSQL A webserver / middle-tier developed using ASP.NET Core 2 An HTTP/JSON based API, with OData support for querying A single-page application front-end developed using modern JavaScript, TypeScript and HTML5 An Electron-based native client for operations that require interactions with the file-system or local processes Essentially, what you can do through the user interface, can be done via the HTTP/JSON-based API. This gives endless opportunities to integrate Scifeon into other systems, or integrate other systems into Scifeon.
System Development
A software development kit (SDK) with a complete Scifeon instance running on your local computer A cloud-hosted Git repository integrated with our testing and deployment pipeline A DevOps pipeline with support for automated testing and deployment We can host Scifeon for you in Microsoft Azure – or you can install it on-premises on your own servers. 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. Cloud-based hosting of Scifeon is single-tenant, i.e. a separate web-server and database for each organization. Thus, you have full database access.
Technical Support
DevOps Framework
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.
Software Development Kit
You can download the Scifeon Software Development Kit (SDK) 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.