Contentful is a cloud based CMS solution that provides the ability to manage content across multiple platforms.The editing interface allows for managing content interactively and provides developers the ability to deliver the content with the programming language and template framework of their choice.
$489
Orchard Harvest LIMS
Score 6.0 out of 10
N/A
Orchard Software in Indiana offers Orchard Harvest LIMS, a laboratory information management system dedicated to providing operational support and streamlining with rules-based decisioning, data analytics and business intelligence, and clear interfaces.
Well suited for our needs of multiple images for auto auctions from a variety of sellers. Pointing them to one platform is easier than attempting to use a variety of platforms as we were doing before (email, slack, Dropbox and Google Drive would randomly be used by a variety of employees )
Harvest is well suited in a lab or a reference lab of about any size. You can customize the workflow with filters and permissions to ensure that the right people have the right abilities when they need them. I would say that it is not as great for locations that have multiple remote locations without great internet. Because of the underlying technologies, latency between client and server can cause havoc.
Contentful uses "references" to allow you to build very modular content. If I have a "slider" content type, I can create a "slide" content type which references a "button" content type, and so forth. This works well, but I occasionally wish there was a better solution for one-off content, like a settings page. Currently, this is done for creating an entire content type called "settings" with a single entry. Not a big deal, but not ideal, either.
There are a few quirks with GatsbyJS integration, etc, but these issues are being fixed and improved upon very quickly.
A minor gripe, but Contentful does not have a way to organize fields within an entry. Entries with many fields are somewhat tiresome to scroll through.
User Interface - The software is like 25 years old, and it feels like it. They have added some buttons and links to try to make it easier, but it's not as flashy as the SaaS applications that are being built these days. It feels like there isn't a lot of time spent on refining the features, just adding more to it.
Archaic Architecture - The application use 4D for the database. This means that you can't use SQL for queries, latency is a huge issue and there isn't a hosted option. You have to have your own in-house server to run the server application.
Client is an Application - We have workstations dedicated to managing the interfaces. These workstations have to run the application as a program and can not run them as a service. This means that if you want to apply Windows updates it required manually closing and re-launching the application.
Data Mining - There are some basic reports, but they do not really allow you to build complex reports about the patients or work being performed.
In the past we've used WordPress to manage documentation content. WordPress was more flexible than Contentful but also prone to inconsistencies and we ended having a lot of hacks to accomplish various WordPress tricks. With Contentful there's less ambiguity so content producers are less likely to go astray. We also have our own in-house programmatic template solution for managing content, but this was a previous pain point when we needed to get the dev team to do a deploy for every content change.
We were looking into changing to another LIS but they failed to get things done and we ended up staying with Orchard. We are now in the process of moving everything to Sequoia since we have grown so much as a lab. I don't have any other experience with another LIS to compare to.
The support provided by Orchard Software for Harvest allows me to not have to worry as much about the system. I can grant them access to my system and trust them to work on the issue while I work on other issues.
The automation saves a lot of time for those in the lab. There have been a few times that the lab has been down for a couple of hours and having to catch up and enter the results from the instruments manually can take the rest of the day.
