The Key to Interfacing Lab Instruments to LIMS or ELN

Is there a space-time anomaly in the instrument interfacing world?  If you were to do a Google search on Interfacing Lab Instruments to LIMS or ELN you would find fascinating, inspiring, and thoughtful articles and several product advertisements. The issues and challenges in interfacing lab instruments to LIMS (and now ELNs), however, appear to be repeating themselves. Topics debating the time, cost, and benefits of interfacing lab instruments, unidirectional vs. bidirectional interfaces, horror stories about proprietary instrument data formats, etc. are virtually unchanged except for the players and standards being discussed.

But the tool, style, or data format standard used to create or facilitate instrument interfacing is not the true critical success factor for interfacing instruments.  The real key to successful interfacing of lab instruments [ …Read More ]