TraqBio - Flexible Progress Tracking for Core Unit Projects

MOTIVATION: Core service units have become an organisational hallmark in many research institutions world wide. Such service cores provide complex state-of-the-art technologies and expertise to the research community. Typically, a user delivers material or raw data to a core. The core defines work packages for ensuing analysis and returns results back to the user. This core activity can be quite complex and time consuming and usually does not communicate itself to the outside. Naturally, the user is highly interested to follow the progress of a project once handed over to the core unit. This generates a time-intensive direct communication activity back and forth. A more effective, convenient and less disruptive way to track the status of a given project by the researcher, but also by core managers, appears highly desirable. Hence, we developed a lightweight and readily implementable web application that allows efficient progress tracking of core unit projects. RESULTS: The web application TraqBio allows for the convenient tracking of projects. Following project set-up by the core, the user receives an e-mail containing links for tracking the project status. Examples are provided for three common core units, namely genomics, proteomics, and bioinformatics units. TraqBio is a secure lightweight web application that can be either used in a standalone setup or incorporated into an existing web server infrastructure. Being accessible not only from classical desktop computers but also from mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, TraqBio offers easy integration into every day work.