eCAT

The best way to give you a sense of what eCAT can do for you and your lab is to let our users tell you about their experiences. Here are a few of the things they’ve said about eCAT:

Web-based – runs in all browsers (IE, Chrome, Firefox, Safari). “Because it’s accessible over the internet eCAT is easy to view, from my office or my lab, or at home.” Larry Gonzalez, University of Oklahoma

iPad optimized “eCAT is easy to use on the iPad and and the iPad’s portability means that eCAT entries are only a few clicks away no matter where you are.” Gough Au, University of Newcastle, Australia

PIs love it. “As a PI I like the ability to monitor experiments and make sure the students are keeping up to date with their bookkeeping. Using the dashboard I can see what has been added every day by each student. I can easily access that information and provide ready input back to the students even mid-stream. This has saved me a significant amount of money in terms of following “red herrings” and in other cases has saved me significant time by stopping or modifying an experiment in progress that was destined for failure. It also helps me minimize the pile of “paper towel notes” that the students have buried on their desk and not put into a proper record.” Paul Plummer, Iowa State University

Flexible “eCAT incredibly flexible in terms of how you can set it up. For example each member of the lab has their own folders and puts their own experiments within that, but it’s very easy to put that information together.” Mike Shipston, University of Edinburgh

Fits existing work patterns “Other solutions make you modify the way you work, whereas eCAT works with the way you‘re already working, just in electronic format.” Kevin Cauchi, University of Michigan

Simple interface, easy to use “The thing I like best about eCAT is it’s very simple to use. I looked at some other electronic lab notebooks and they were complicated or overly designed. eCAT has a very simple interface. It’s very flexible so I can just go in and immediately start writing my lab notebook the way I used to with a paper lab notebook. It’s simple, I don’t have to spend any time figuring it out.” Matt Nicotra, University of Pittsburgh

Better than a paper labbook! “I use eCAT for everything in the laboratory when I need to make a note of anything. I use it for my experiments and my protocols. But I also use it for things I didn’t use my labbook for before I had an electronic lab notebook. I use it for digital photos, so protein gels, screenshots of my HPC runs, screenshots of the small things I see during my experiment. Before I would have just made a small note about it, now I have a photo of it. And I also add time stamps during an experiment so I can easily see at what point I did a certain thing. The main result is very large quality improvements. It also brings structure to your experiments automatically. Since you are working with project folders you have your own experiments, and you also add protocols, and you add the data and you add whatever electronic stuff you get during the experiments to that folder. So everything gets sorted by date and time. It’s much more structure, automatically." Andreas Johansson, National Oceonography Centre, Southampton.

Great customer service. “We have been highly impressed with the level of customer service offered from Axiope. It is clear that they take pride in their product, are concerned about the customer’s experience and are always receptive to suggestions for feature additions and/or changes.” ModEncode Consortium

Sample tracking for today . . . and tomorrow. “ e-CAT has worked very well for tracking animals and sample locations. The great thing we saw in eCAT was a system that could be suited to varying needs as they change over time. It had a nice architecture that could be well suited to our needs right now, but also one that was flexible enough to handle all kinds of different data needs as they emerge in the future.” Skinner lab, University of Washington

Integrated ELN and sample management: “A fantastic feature of eCAT we use is this ability to include metadata and links within records. So when we have transgenic mice we can track the mouse, the tissues that were made from the mouse, the extracts from the tissues, then the analyses on those extracts and keep them all linked through eCAT.” Alex Swarbrick, Garvan Institute, Australia

All this and much more, including:
• Drag and drop file importer – just like Wordpress and Google Docs!
• Audit trail and time stamp for patent protection and compliance
• Messaging system for communication