Our latest release of LabArchives (www.labarchives.com) includes a powerful new feature that we are calling “LA-Docs”.  In addition to being a very important new function for our users, LA-Docs also is a blueprint for our vision of the future of LabArchives as we continue in our rapid development of this innovative product.

So what is LA-Docs? In a nutshell, it is a new function that enables users of LabArchives to create and edit Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents without ever leaving their Notebooks (you don’t even need a license for Microsoft Office)!  Prior to this, when editing these file types, one needed to save them to their local drive and “re-upload” them to their Notebooks, which required additional steps (as well as remembering to upload them).   Since these document types represent a significant portion of the files used by LabArchives subscribers, this is a major step forward in bringing additional convenience to our customers.    And unlike some other collaborative software, such as Google Docs, your documents never leave the safety of our server (Google keeps copies of all documents that are used in Google Docs).

As enthusiastic as we are about this development, we are even more excited about the potential demonstrated by LA-Docs, and what it means for the future of LabArchives and our vision for the evolution of our product.  Our goal is to make LabArchives the “hub” of the workflow of most scientists by helping to integrate the various software tools that they use with our product so that they can conduct much of their laboratory work from within the “framework” of LabArchives.  Our initial integration with two leading scientific tools, GraphPad Prism and Treestar’s FlowJo, are also indicative of the direction that we are taking.   We plan further enhancements to the integration of these products with LabArchives in the near future;  in the longer term, our goal is to jointly create versions of these and other product on the LabArchives servers, so that licensed users may conduct curve fitting, statistics, flow cytometry analysis, and much more from within their LabArchives Notebooks.

We are currently discussing integration of various bibliographic management software with LabArchives.  We would like to hear from you…our users….as to what products you would like to see integrated with LabArchives.