Sample specification in Bika 1.0 was wine laboratory specific and only customisable in the source code; schema editor in 1.1 enables creation of custom sample types to meet cross industry requirements
Schema editors, accessible from Bika's management panel, were also added for order attributes and client and contact configuration.
A 'How to use the Bika schema editor' has been published online to assist laboratories in using it.
Further customisation and developments for micro-biological, food and health laboratory requirements are currently being discussed with local and international prospects and partners on the Bika community site.
With version 1.1, Bika also migrates to Plone 2.1, offering laboratories access to extensive content management capabilities and provides easy document management for client, laboratory or management purposes.
Performance is another focus of the release - many optimisations throughout the code base were made by Bika developers Upfront Systems for a noticeable improvement in performance.
With Plone 2.1, Bika moves onto the long awaited Zope 2.8 application server and Zope object database ZODB 3.4.
ZODB 3.4 has multi version concurrency control (MVCC) support, very important for high-traffic Zope sites.
This should dramatically improve Bika's performance when used by many users concurrently.
The Bika 1.1 update includes Plone 2.1 compatibility, schema editors, performance enhancements, late analysis alerts, analyses hyper-linked to job cards on requests, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish translations contributed by Joris Goudriaan, Pierpaolo Baldan, Nuno R Pinhao, and Luis Espinoza
