UW CORAL - Introduction for Lab Managers

What are the benefits of UW CORAL?

The UW CORAL system is designed to simplify and provide greater rigor to the process of keeping track of user qualification and instrument use in a shared lab or cost center. Briefly put, UW CORAL enforces lab policies on the use of instruments and frees the lab management from much of the paperwork.

More specifically, UW CORAL offers these benefits:

• Instrument usage measured by sign-in and sign-out time stamps which can be used for billing. (Not all instruments will support rigorous time measurement; see locking below.)
• Facility or location-based scan-in and scan-out stations. Some facilities do not track usage of individual equipment, but of the use of a room or suite. Coral can track usage of this kind through a login kiosk, or users can scan their HuskyCard on the way in and out. (Your facility would have to supply the hardware for the kiosks.)
• A user registration system that ensures that users keep any EH&S requirements up to date, and that they have received the necessary training to use your facility as a whole. Users are sent warnings when necessary EH&S training is about to expire, and cannot use instruments if it has expired.
• User roles that ensure that a user is qualified before using each instrument. (Some instruments can be marked "does not require training" if desired, and some users as well. Lab staff never need explicit qualification.) User qualification expires after a certain amount of time, which may be different for each instrument; so you can be confident that a user logged in to an instrument probably remembers how to use it.
• UW CORAL generates files suitable for upload to FasTrans, for billing UW customers; and files in Invoice Receivables' format for billing external users. It also generates invoices that can be emailed to external users. It does not itself directly interact with FasTrans or with Invoice Receivables, however, so the lab management and departmental fiscal staff maintain final control.
• Notifications for physical access to be granted and revoked based on instrument qualification. If your facility is in a single room, you will probably grant physical access once a user has gone through orientation. If, however, you have instruments in several rooms with access controlled by CAAMS, it may be more convenient to have UW CORAL notify the person responsible for granting access when users gain or lose qualification on instruments.
• Private per-user shared drives, which allow users to retrieve their files from instruments without requiring either that the instrument computer be connected to the UW network, or the use of USB keys.
• A user mailing list for each instrument, plus a separate mailing list for instrument "super users".
• Reservation calendars for each instrument, with display granularity between 10 minutes and one hour, depending on the instrument.
• Site statistics, breaking down usage hours and revenue by user (or department, school, PI, etc.), by instrument, or by equipment location.
• Relatively flexible billing logic. Separate rates for UW, non-UW academic, and industrial users are standard, as are $0 rates for students on STF-funded equipment. It is also possible to give users discounts based on in-kind compensation, bulk usage, or other criteria.
• We handle the server operation and development. UW CORAL is not software that you would install on a system in your department (though see locking, below). Rather, it is operated by the UW Collaboration Core as software as a service. A major benefit of this arrangement is that the departmental IT staff doesn't have to deal with installation and maintenance of a new service.

How much does it cost?

For a moderately large center of, say, 20 instruments, we've been charging a rate of 1% FTE for each of the two development team members. This cost covers installation and maintenance, and the fact that we are on your payroll helps keep us accountable.

If you have a much larger lab, or a much smaller installation (say, a single instrument that you would like to add to UW CORAL), please contact us for pricing.

How does the setup work?

First, one of the UW CORAL team will come visit your facility, to talk over the installation with you and see how the locks will work and what your needs are. At this point you will need to draw up internal (UW) and non-UW user agreements, if you have not already done so.

Once an agreement is reached, we'll set up an entry for your lab in UW CORAL, configure user registration and have one of the lab management register, to make sure the user registration works to your satisfaction. Then we would send all of your lab staff through registration, and have you approve them.

We'll also connect information about your instruments, which type of lock each one will have, and their rates. The instrument records will be created at this time, and you can have users register and mark them qualified on instruments.

Once that is done, we'll return to your facility and set up the locks, whether hardware or screen locks. At that point users can start using your facility in UW CORAL.

Finally, when you are ready to start using UW CORAL for billing, we'll walk you through the process of reconciling instrument use, generating and finalizing billing, and generating and sending invoices.

Locking

Other shared facilities have reviewed video footage of their labs and estimated that, when using the honor system, around 30% of equipment use was done off the books, whether by intentional cheating or through wishful interpretation of how long a given task took. There have also been cases where users (or, indeed, non-users) damaged instruments through negligence or improper use. For an unlocked instrument, nothing prevents anyone from attempting to use an instrument, and it may be impossible to tell who might have done so. Because of that, we highly recommend locking instruments whenever possible.

Depending on how an instrument works, there are several different ways it might be locked:

• Hardware lock. This uses electric relays to physically prevent the instrument from working until a user enables it. This is the preferred method for instruments that do not include a computer running a recent version of Windows.
• Screen lock. For microscopes and other instruments that only work while a user is interacting with the screen, UW CORAL has a screen lock system that allows the user to log in on the instrument's screen. Applications continue to run behind the login screen, but users cannot interact with them until they are logged in. The screen lock requires Windows XPsp3 or higher, though we have a limited-capability version that can run on Windows 2000.
• Reservation (honor system). Users reserve time on an instrument, but the instrument itself is not locked. Typically, reservations cannot be changed after the fact. If the instrument is in constant use, users will challenge someone using the instrument during their reservation, and the next user will know immediately if the previous user caused a problem. This can be an effective way to control instruments that are over-subscribed, provided that physical access prevents off hours use.
• Time Sheet (honor system). Users report their usage after the fact, using a time sheet. This may be necessary for instruments that run unattended for long periods of time, though automatic logout may be a better solution if the instrument can be screen locked. Time sheets are easier to reconcile if lab policy mandates reservations in advance of equipment use.
• Notional lock (honor system). An instrument can be set up so that users log in and out using the UW CORAL interface, but the instrument itself is not affected in any way.

If you are interested in UW CORAL, or have any questions, please contact me at