For someone that doesn’t know how to separate the products, one of the early parts of the process is to determine “what type” of product you need and to find only products that are in that vein. Since LIMS carry ELN functionality, ELNs carry LIMS functionality, and we continue to merge and combine functionalities in our industry, it is important to stay somewhat away from the labels.

As such, if you want a system for your Clinical laboratory’s sample processing, go find systems that provides functionality that seem initially appropriate and compare only those. Or, if you have a chemistry lab where you want to replace the paper lab notebooks with electronic ones, go find products that seem to meet those needs. If you’re looking for some big combination, one-size-fits-all, that’s where it’s especially important to understand what you need to achieve.

Those are steps to take during the product selection process. What I’m trying to point out is that we really can compare products. Once, again, this is quite a lot of work and I’m not trying to minimize it. However, for end-user companies that have not been involved with these systems, before, and who do not want to pay an outsider to help them, it would be useful to find some type of area to get this type of information. But, to go back to John Trigg’s comment that we seem to shy-away from making public negative comments about software in our industry, until we jump that hurdle, it just won’t happen.

In addition, there is considerable diversity between laboratories, and what may work for one organisation won’t work for another. We’re also a relatively close-knit community, and although there are inevitable tensions, the customer-vendor relationship can be very strong and is often considered a contributor to successful projects. This point is often raised in successful case studies presented at conferences. But it is very unusual to hear of an unsuccessful project, or for the vendor or product associated with the project to be named.

It’s not surprising therefore that product reviews for laboratory systems are impossible to come by. What is surprising is that there is little freely available information in the public domain on product comparisons; taking the published specifications of products to compare relevant features in order to help the curious get a better perspective on the alignment with their specific needs. Is this something we should be doing on The Integrated Lab?

Then, as for how to do it, that is trickier, of course. For starters, there are already places to find lists of software vendors for various types of products, so I’m not quite sure you should start yet another one. But I think users would like to find just one place to look for products. If you happened to know of a specific place that was “best” for a particular category of software, you could possibly just suggest it instead of building your own. Of course, by having no control over the list, that “great” list might not be well-attended and might not stay very good. As such, you’d have to keep checking it. I suspect that’s why everyone creates their own and then most of the lists aren’t really all that great.

Or, if you don’t want product lists, at all, what about a “guest” spot where you post information about a product. Maybe you could regularly take input from a software vendor on their product (for very mature products, maybe it would merely be “what’s new” and not an entire list of features). Then, just post what you’re given with no editing but you could have a disclaimer that that’s what you’re doing — that it’s not your opinion. Actually, you could create a separate account for yourself so that it’s even clearer that it’s not your usual posting. Invite vendors to do this but only post one every once in awhile. That way, the readers don’t feel spammed with product information, but some readers might find it intersting or useful. Also, by doing it at intervals, it’s not necessarily a lot of work for you (as I suspect there could be times where you’d get inundated with quite a lot of them). Or, maybe you could make it a separate section from the regular blog. To be fair on the postings, make it on a first-come-first-serve basis. Thus, the 10th vendor to send you information is the 10th one in your guest series.

Even though that is “commercial” it’s done in a controlled way. I wouldn’t suggest allowing comments on these. If someone wants more information, they can write directly to the vendor. That way, we all see only the post and not any responses, so if we had no interest in the commercial items, it would only be an occasional posting.

Mainly, I think the objection to commercial items is when something merely turns into a series of advertisements, but with no other content. If you mainly have content, but only the occasional piece of product information, that would keep a balance.

These are just my musings — I hope some others will weigh-in on this. Personally, the occasional piece of product information wouldn’t bother me.