Thanks to the incredible efforts of our dev team RSpace is improving at an outstanding pace. Due to the rapid development of RSpace, we are launching a new review section that will be published every six months. This section will cover the most important updates and changes in the RSpace ecosystem.

The first edition of the review concerns the second half of 2017.

Science Tools

This is a more modern version of the ‘Widgets’ feature in Lab Archives, supportingin app calculations of various kinds. In addition, a related Online Tools feature, not available in Lab Archives, provides access to a broader range of online sciencetools.

API enhancements

A ‘write’ capability has been added to the pre-existing ‘read’ capability, enabling newways to upload files and create content. Using this capability, computational chemists at Edinburgh have written scripts to log things automatically from their HPC cluster ontoRSpace. Other API improvements include the ability to export work programmatically in html or xml, supporting programmatic scheduled data exports.

Improvements to Slack integration and new Microsoft Teams integration

Major enhancements to the Slack integration include the ability to search RSpace contentfrom within Slack, and the ability to import content from Slack into RSpace, e.g. to associate Slack discussion about research documented in RSpace with the research itself. A new integration with Microsoft Teams (Microsoft’s answer to Slack) enables association of RSpace content with discussion in Teams, another addition to the RSpace integrationwith the Office 365 suite which also includes linking to documents in OneDrive, Word-round trip editing.

Enhancements to document linking capability

RSpace now supports bi-directional linking of documents and Gallery items. This means that not only can you link to other content , but you can also see what documents reference a piece of content. This enables, for example , easy identification of all experimental write-ups that reference resources such raw data, protocols, and statistical test results.

For a list of all new features introduced in the last half of 2017, visit the RSpace changelog.