We’re putting the final touches to RSpace 1.50, which will be out later this week. There’s a lot of improvements and new features to introduce, most of them based on suggestions and requests from you, our users.

The most obvious improvement is a tree-view of your content that you will see when you are viewing or editing a notebook entry:

We’ve added this so as to make it easier to switch between entries without having to go back to the Workspace. This also makes it easier to link to other content – simply Drag and Drop from the TreeView into the editor  to make the link:

As another productivity aid, we’re adding some keyboard shortcuts into the text editor for some common operations like linking or inserting content – please ask if you’d like more shortcuts!

Another request we’ve had quite frequently is to enable documents to be printed so you can take a paper copy of a protocol into the lab with you. Actually, RSpace has always had this feature but it was not at all obvious – so we’ve added Print button on the Toolbar.

There’s one more integration added this month, with Google Hangouts Chat (GHC). This is Google’s Team messaging platform, their answer to Slack and Microsoft Teams. You can post messages to GHC with links to notebook entries direct from RSpace, and also search RSpace from within GHC. Please let us know if you’d like this integration enabled.

Finally, we’ve added several new capabilities to our API – creating folders and notebooks, and creating Forms. With these new methods the API is now rich enough to support bulk import of content from other sources – including other ELNs! If you would like to try RSpace but are currently using another ELN, we can help you to transfer your data across to RSpace. Lack of interoperability between ELNs is definitely a major barrier to uptake – prospective users feel they have to make an irreversible decision on which ELN to adopt, because of the difficulty of switching –  but with the increasing maturity of APIs by some vendors this  problem is finally  being addressed.

As always, we are always keen to get your feedback – good and bad – it really helps us to improve RSpace.