Laboratories, research facilities and organizations managing biomedical inventory are welcoming the release of Sample Inventory Program .  The project was funded by the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research  in San Antonio, Texas.  The development team led by Alan Runyan of Enfold Systems showed far reaching vision with their SIP implementation for both SFBR and for the research community at large.

• Open Source community support  SIP is an open source application based on the Zope 3 application.
• Cross platform and database agnostic - The system is currently deployed on Red Hat Linux and the Postgres relational database.
• User Benefits - Web based interface that enables easy querying / adding / managing of projects, samples, and metadata  individually and in bulk via text file import/export capabilities.
• Cost effective  The SIP application is available under an open source license to urge other laboratories to adopt a common sample inventory system.  If widely adopted, the long term benefits of sharing a platform with partnering organizations will be vast.
• Giving back  Government funded & released to public - The development of SIP has been supported in part by NHLBI grant P01 HL45522, NCRR grant P51 RR013986, and SFBR.

SFBR is continuing the project by building rich client integrations for bulk data entry and efficiency.  By December 2005, Enfold Systems hopes to start a community project with the SIP application code, and has initially released the software on sourceforge.net.  Grants will soon be submitted to fund a Windows installation of the software so it can be easily distributed to laboratories around the world. 

More information can be found at:  http://www.enfoldsystems.com/Products/SIP