We have been using CERF for over a year now for the National Alliance for Advanced Biofuels and Bio-products (NAABB) program. Being that this consortium is comprised of 28 different organizations across the country, we needed a way for everyone to collaborate efficiently and effectively with minimal effort. CERF allowed us to set up workgroups and file shares to share documents with whomever needed to see the correct data, enable global sharing for certain areas, and allow team sharing for certain teams. It is 100% customizable for permissions with respect to access certain file cabinets or notebooks. If you need a new configuration, you just simply create a new workgroup and assign it to the new FC (File Cabinet) or NB (Notebook). At the end of the day it is almost the complete package for the NAABB organization (I say almost, because they are constantly improving user features). The electronic notebooks allow for image integration, MS Office, PDF, and many other types of document support to your notebook pages (a demo of CERF ELN from Lab-Ally would be the best way to see this in action). The metadata and search integration allows PI’s to search for data and find what they are looking for in seconds. The vendor is also very responsive to any issues I have had as well as very receptive to any suggestions that we have either as admin or as users. In fact they just released version 4.5 which addressed many of the (previous) user’s suggestions and are already working on version 5 with more updates for to enhance the experience even further. They also just released an iPad version of CERF with many enhancements coming for it as well. If I were selecting an electronic notebook company, it would hands down be CERF ELN.
– Jeremy Tate, CERF Administrator and Help Desk Manager at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center (DDPSC)