Thanks so much for the thoughtful feedback—I really appreciate you laying out the practical challenges. Here’s how I’m addressing each of your concerns:
- No “one‑size‑fits‑all” Totally agree—enterprise LIMS vendors spend massive budgets just to get close. I’m starting with a single lab vertical (ELISA immunology workflows) because those protocols are extremely consistent across small labs.
Resistance to workflow changes I won’t force anyone into a new process. The app will let you upload raw CSV/Excel exports straight from your plate reader—no special drivers or proprietary APIs needed. Protocol templates are fully configurable, so each lab can mirror exactly how they already work on paper or in spreadsheets.
Access controls & audit trails Even in the first version, I’ll include:
-Admin vs. Researcher roles so you can limit who edits protocols vs. who just runs assays.
-A simple audit log that timestamps every protocol change or data upload, so you can always trace “who did what, when.”
- SSO & deep instrument integration I hear you that true two‑way instrument APIs and campus SSO are essential for enterprise LIMS—but they’re a heavy lift for an MVP. I’ll start with email/password accounts and focus on parsing the most common CSV/XML outputs. If there’s demand down the road, I can look at institutional SSO or more direct instrument links later.
Thanks again for helping me zero in on what really matters and pls feel free to critique anything that feels wrong with this plan too.
My recommendation is to take a couple of days and research what is already available. Is it more productive to spend a week and test several solutions out there, or whatever time it takes to build and debug a new solution? I wrote many programs over the years that I didn't need to, so this comes from experience.
I've seen a few of these posts, and you seem to be highlighting that it is 'lightweight'. I think that's a bad move - what do you think that means, what do you think the audience thinks it means? Nobody cares how many lines of code you write, in fact less features is less capability. I know for programmers it is a virtue to make things bare-bones, it will be faster, but you're not trying to support tens of thousands of users, you're going to have less than four people signed in to the app at once! Lightweight just means incomplete to them.