Looking into the Future: Almanac

[SiCubbon]

Hang on, what are you on about?

As a child, I can always remember reading something called an Almanac at my parents’ house – it stood out against the other books, and in the pre-internet era (yes, I’ve just dated myself!) it contained a whole host of interesting information and predictions.

Now, of course, we have more computing power at our fingertips than was used to put mankind on the moon, and instant access to pretty much all our collective knowledge with the internet.

OK, so you read a book when you were a child…

Yes, I’ll get to the point. If we look at the definition of ‘almanac’ above, then obtaining facts and information about a particular subject or activity seems like a pretty important ‘thing’ to be able to do. In the world of analytical science, we are always searching for more information to generate facts or drive hypothesis; this could be determining the latest biotherapeutics, ensuring that our food and drink is safe to consume, that our environment is free from pollutants, and so much more.

So, combining this, with the modern thirst for instant information and knowledge, you might be pleased to know that you can combine ‘almanac’ with mass spectrometry (and a whole host of other scientific instrumentation) to do this.

Thermo Scientific Almanac Web-Based Monitoring and Management

If you can connect your instrumentation to the internet, and you have a laptop, desktop or smartphone with internet access, then you can join in the world of “remote monitoring”!

From the quick-glance, to check that your system is still acquiring your data, or if the instrument is free (or if not, when it will be), through to automated notifications, scheduling, system utilization for productivity monitoring, and more, the Thermo Scientific Almanac Web-Based Monitoring and Management application (which is free, I might add) is for you.

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An example of the Status Tab, which displays the acquisition queue, instrument status, real-time chromatogram, time remaining, as well as providing access to events monitoring and an on-line log-book.

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Understanding the utilization of your instrumentation can be useful when it comes to increasing laboratory productivity, or identifying which systems have bandwidth available for that “emergency analysis.”

Above and beyond monitoring and system utilization, there are additional tools which can let you schedule instrument access, as well as view instrument events and utilize an on-line logbook to record events, and add user-information such as free text, images and documents.

Whether you are online or not, you have the capability to generate a “service bundle” which captures all relevant system information (and no personal, sample or raw data information) to aid our service team in diagnosing any system issues; obviously, if you are connected to the Cloud, then all of this can be performed within Almanac.

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It isn’t just Almanac that can bring the benefits of Cloud connectivity to your lab, discover more about how the Cloud provides multiple benefits across the laboratory environment in this handy infographic, or visit our Cloud for Mass Spectrometry information centre.