More than 100 universities across the world have chosen to make MestReNova available to all their chemists, researchers and students with Campus licenses.

Through all this time, we have learned some lessons from our customers about how to maximize the adoption while doing the trial or in the first steps since the Campus license has been rolled out.

1. Create a webpage on your university, faculty or department site where you explain to your users what Mnova is for, where they can get it and how to download their license files (download a PDF file with a suggested text).
   

   Create a page like this one at your site with information for your users

2. Make sure your page points to our site and specifically to your specific Campus trial webpage at our site. Our team will send you your specific URL before you begin your trial.
3. Distribute an email like this to all possible users and allow them to forward it to their colleagues.
Dear friend,

Our faculty has just started a MestReNova Campus trial that will last from January to March 2011.

Mnova is a multipage, multivendor, multitechnique and multiplatform analytical chemistry software suite which will allow you to handle, process, analyze and report all your NMR and LC/GC/MS data in your desktop or laptop computer.

Follow this link to download the software http://mestrelab.com/ and answer this email to request your specific license file.

John Sample

NMR Facility Manager at Sample University


4. Encourage the users to join one of our webinar sessions to get started with Mnova or to have a look at our starting guides.
5. Do not hesitate to contact our support team to ask any questions regarding the test or our software

Dani marketing No comments Leave a comment

We have just finished the SMASH 2010 conference, and I am keen to post on it as soon as possible. This year, SMASH was held at Portland, OR, in the US. It was an excellent conference, with a varied and very well received program, chaired by Andreas Kaerner and Brian Marquez, which you can check out here.
One very exciting development in the conference was that, for the first time this year, SMASH was organized jointly with CoSMoS (Conference on Small Molecule Science), at the same venue on the same dates, and with joint sessions on the final day (Wednesday 29th). This makes perfect sense, not only for chemists, who regularly use a combination of NMR and LCMS to do their everyday job, but also for us, who have software plugins to handle data from both techniques, and who therefore had the opportunity of getting to 2 different audiences simultaneously. This is a very welcome development and I want to congratulate the organizing committees of both conferences for raising above technique rivalry and pulling this together.
From the Mestrelab point of view, this was an excellent conference, with several exciting things to be highlighted:

1. We had an excellent user meeting, with a total of over 50 attendees.
   

   Chen and Santi with the iPads, about to give them away to the fastest and luckiest at the 'Speed Analytics'

2. We showcased not only a new version of Mnova, 6.2.0, but a newly released product (our Spectral DB, currently on late beta and available to try out if you want to do so, just let us know) and a quickly advancing project which is not yet ready for release or external testing, but which is giving better and better results (our Automatic Structure Verification module, now incorporating NMR and LC/GC/MS)
3. For the first time, we held the new ‘Mestrelab Contest’, in which our users (or any other attendees) got the chance of winning 2 iPads, by completing a workflow in Mnova as fast as possible (one iPad went to the fastest person, another one was drawn amongst all those who took part). The contest was great fun, over 50 people took part, and we had a great time running it, so expect it to feature at future meetings! Andy Phillips (AZ) won the contest, with a time of 3’58” (nobody else got under 5′), and Ana Paula Espindola (UT Southwestern) won the draw. Congratulations to both winners.

Over the next few days, I will blog on these items above, to give you more information and maybe, to set out a contest for those of you who did not come to SMASH, but still want to try your hand at ‘speed analytics’

Santi Conferences, marketing, Trips and business development, Uncategorized conferences, Mestrelab at SMASH, Mestrelab contest, Spectral DB, user meeting No comments Leave a comment

When you buy an annual or perpetual license for any of Mnova’s plugins, you are entitled to one year of minor and major updates as well as free technical support (throughout the one year period from date of purchase).

If you’re not sure when your annual or your perpetual license’s Update&Support package will expire, you can actually find this information within the application: simply run Mnova and go to ‘Help/License Manager’.

Let’s see an example of a perpetual license:

In this particular case, the Update&Support package for the NMR plugin has expired, meaning that I won’t be able to install any updates which have been released by up to 30 days ago (see the column ‘Update Days= -30′ in red). However I will be able to use the last version I updated to because my license is perpetual (never expires).

To find out all of Mnova’s release dates, please take a look at this link at the download page.

Alternatively, you can take a look at our summarized list of releases below (click here to see what features you are missing if you are running an old version of Mnova):

• Mnova 6.1.1 – Apr 13th, 2010
• Mnova 6.1.0 – Mar 22nd, 2010
• Mnova 6.0.4 – Jan 20th, 2010
• Mnova 6.0.3 – November 17th, 2009
• Mnova 6.0.2 – October 9th. 2009
• Mnova 6.0.1 – September 15th, 2009
• Mnova 6.0.0 – September 15th, 2009
• Mnova 5.3.3 – August 31st, 2009
• Mnova 5.3.2 – June 4th, 2009
• Mnova 5.3.1 – April 3rd,  2009
• Mnova 5.3.0 – December 23rd, 2008
• Mnova 5.2.5 – October 7th, 2008
• Mnova 5.2.4 – August 7th, 2008
• Mnova 5.2.3 – June 20th, 2008
• Mnova 5.2.2 – May 15th, 2008
• Mnova 5.2.1 – April 3rd, 2008
• Mnova 5.2.0 – February 29th, 2008
• Mnova 5.1.0 – November 10th, 2007
• Mnova 5.0.3 – July 27th, 2007

After the one year period from the original purchase, Update&Support packages can be purchased at 20% of the current cost of the equivalent licence. These will include all minor and major updates throughout the one year period after purchase and free technical support for one year. Please note that the prices quoted are net of all taxes. All taxes due in the country where the customer is based are the sole responsibility of the customer.

If you are interested in the renewal of your Update&Support package just visit our webstore or email us at sales@mestrelab.com

Of course, normally the Updates&Support package for an annual license will expire on the same day as the license, and the software will stop working unless you buy a new license.

pablo marketing, Products, support support, updates No comments Leave a comment

We are celebrating at Mestrelab these days, and not only because our 5th anniversary is approaching (more on that on a later post), but also because we have exceeded a milestone we are very proud of: we now have more than 50 academic institutions with perpetual campus licenses for Mnova NMR!

Amongst them, there are many very prestigious names, including, but not comprehensively, as I am only mentioning some of those who have given permission to be mentioned on our web communications:

• Yale University
• Caltech
• University of Rhode Island
• Princeton University
• The Scripps Research Institute
• ETH Zurich
• University of Ulm
• Munchen TU
• University of Munster
• Broad Institute at Harvard and MIT
• Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
• Simon Fraser University
  University of Colorado at Boulder
• University of Barcelona
• Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona
• CSIC
• CNRS
• …

So why have these guys decided to go with a campus license of Mnova? I think there are several very obvious and very compelling reasons. I could expand on that and add more, but I want to keep this short and simple:

1. This allows them to give all their faculty, researchers and students access to the same platform to process, visualize and report NMR and LC/GC/MS data, independently of the NMR/MS equipment they are working with (with some exceptions in the case of MS, contact us to find out more)
2. They can accommodate Windows (including Windows 7 ), Mac OS and Linux users with one single software application (this is for the NMR and NMRPredict Desktop plugins at present)
3. The licensing is extremely flexible and allows users to work at remote locations even when not connected to the institution’s network (read more about licensing here), so this is great for processing and visualizing data whilst at conferences, working from home, writing up a PhD on a mountain retreat,…
4. Perpetual campus licenses are excellent value for money with a very low cost per head (you can find out more about pricing at our Store ). Just for example, for a University with 300 users, the PERPETUAL license for the NMR plugin works out at around €42 per user, and that is without considering the fact that new users in future will also be able to use the software, so in the long run the institution is looking at €10/€20 per user.

Of course, if any of you reading this are at an institution with a campus license, it would be great to see a comment about your main reasons to buy it, you know better than me!

Free 120 day Campus Trial

What do you do if your institution does not have a campus license yet? The good news is that you now have a great opportunity to try this out and see how it may work for you. We are giving away 120 day campus license installations for all Mnova plugins, to allow institutions to give ALL their users full access to our software for a limited time period and thus evaluate the level of interest in their community and the usefulness of the software in their working day. If you would like to take advantage of this opportunity, all you have to do is Contact Us mentioning BLOG-CAMPUS LICENSE in the subject. We will give you all the instructions and get your institution set up with its campus license in no time! Just imagine all those happy users processing

And just one more thing before I go for today: if you finally decide to get a campus (or other) license for your institution, do not forget that you can donate, at no cost, a similar license to an institution in less developed countries, within our NMR For All program.

Santi marketing campus licenses, customers, licenses, Mnova 13 comments Leave a comment

Update: Mnova MS 25% off price list for existing Mnova customers. Check the promo at our webpage

On a previous post of a few days ago I wrote:

It is clear that the LC/GC/MS market is at a juncture which I think the NMR market has already been at. Too many vendors with too many software data systems for the average user, and a significant interest in a transparent visualization / post processing / analysis tool for LC/GC/MS data. It seems that Analytical Departments are currently split down the middle, with many quite happy to give LCMS or GCMS spectra to their chemists in PDF or even hard copy, and many expecting to give them more, and expecting more from them. For the latter, of course, the Mnova MS plugin could be the ideal tool. Over the next day or two, I will blog more on the arguments for this second approach.

Now is the time to elaborate on this. Imagine a typical customer who has in their lab NMR spectrometers from 2 different manufacturers and LC/MS or GC/MS from 4 major manufacturers.  I am sure you would agree this is fairly typical. This customer has streamlined its operation to gain productivity by operating the lab in open access, allowing all organic/synthetic/medicinal chemists (hereon chemists for convenience, as opposed to analytical chemists, I hope I don’t upset any purists) to submit samples directly for experiments and run a routine set of experiments (just a standard 1H-NMR and an LCMS, for example).

The customer then has 2 options:

1. They can analyze the results, verify the samples match the structures proposed by the chemists, annotate the analytical data and prepare a report in the analytical group. This will result in the time of the analytical group being tied up in a lot of routine work and in the chemists having to wait for longer to get their results and continue with their drug design (or otherwise) work.
2. They can make the data available to the chemist who submitted the sample (by placing it on a repository on a server, by emailing to the chemist, etc.) and let the chemists do the analysis, annotation and report preparation. The chemists can then revert to the analytical department for problems, difficulties, for situations when the expected structure cannot be confirmed, etc. The work of the analytical department will then be more focused around problem solving, elucidation, controlling instruments, implementing new experiments and, potentially, doing research. How liberating. As for the chemists, they will get their results quicker and will be able to get on with their work, for those cases where everything goes well.

Option 2, I think, has a few advantages: It is more productive, it allows the customer to get more high-end value out of the analytical chemists and to have a more satisfied analytical chemistry group, with more interesting jobs and more scientific output.

This seems to have become accepted by most companies and institutions when it comes to NMR. In the great majority of cases, when I speak to or visit potential customers, the chemists are the ones doing the post-processing of data and report preparation. However, in the case of LC/GC/MS, the balance seems to be very different, with most analytical departments doing the verification work and reporting to the chemists either on paper or pdf. Paper, of course, has the limitation of being harder to move around, harder to take with you, etc., so a lot more cumbersome from a logistics point of view, not to mention the fact that it does  not work as part of an electronic environment where Electronic Lab Notebooks or other data management tools are being used. Not to mention, of course, the environmental impact of manufacturing all this paper and printer cartridges, recycling of the cartridges, etc.  (you cannot have a serious blog post these days without at least one mention to the environment). PDF is better from those points of view, but still results in a lot of information loss. The chemist gets a result which does not tell him/her much about their data, other than what they were looking for, and that can result in lost opportunities or, if the result is negative, a lot of coming and froing between chemist and analytical chemist, until more is learnt about the failure. This is an inefficient workflow.

Of course, up until now, giving the chemists the ability to run LC/GC/MS in open access was fraught with difficulty (or, at least, hampered by a significant hurdle) for multivendor labs, in that potentially the chemists would have to learn several software packages to handle their data, all of them with different paradigms, different behaviour and, often, inflexible and expensive licensing.

By combining NMR processing and analysis within Mnova, we have aimed to eliminate these difficulties and to allow our customers to run in the second scenario outlined above, with the productivity and satisfaction advantages already outlined, but keeping a very important concept in mind: simplicity and consistency of use of the software and minimal learning curve. This could work something like:

NMR and MS Workflow. Click to see full-size

So, in this scenario, the chemists are doing their own validation and producing high quality reports, ready for submission to registration and other corporate systems, or to publication, or to be potentially included for thesis write up. This does not require involvement from the analytical group, so this group does not become a bottleneck, overloaded by many routine requests from many chemists. The analytical group then get the tough jobs and can focus on those, remaining an analytical group and not a report preparation group.

But, in order to run in open access, it makes sense to ask chemists to learn one single software package, as learning a series of analytical packages would be too time consuming and detract from their ‘day job’. This is where Mnova comes in, offering a fully integrated environment for the chemist to work in, and with the following, highly summarized, capabilities:

Mnova NMR

• Read and process automatically:
  • Bruker, Varian, JEOL, etc.
  • 1D and2D NMR
• Phase and baseline correction
• Peak Picking, Integration, Multiplet Analysis
• Many advanced tools: Deconvolution, data analysis, array handling, etc.
• Reporting, annotations, easy exporting to MS Office, Open Office, PDF, PNG, JPG, EPS, etc

Mnova MS

• Read and process automatically:
  • Agilent, Bruker, Thermo, Waters,  etc
  • LCMS, GCMS
• TIC peak picking and integration
• MS peak picking
• Structure confirmation – match TIC to proposed structures
• Molecular formula elucidation: present possible formulae for a molecular ion
• Reporting, annotations, easy exporting to MS Office, Open Office, PDF, PNG, JPG, EPS, etc

My question is: Has your company / university tried to run with NMR and MS in open access? If you haven’t  yet, you should consider it. And, to facilitate that process, Mestrelab would be delighted to give you a temporary site or campus license so that you can evaluate the potential of implementing this setup. All you have to do is contact us on support@mestrelab.com, or via our website or this blog.

Below you can see a typical report easily generated with Mnova NMR and MS.

Santi marketing, Products Mnova MS No comments Leave a comment

As promised on my last post of a couple of days ago, there are a few things pending, mainly:

• ESOR 2009 trip report (Haifa, Israel)
• SMASH 2009 trip report (Chamonix, France)
• More on the current MS market status for software and the arguments for a tool such as Mnova MS.

All this is coming very soon, but, after seeing this specific question a number of times over the last few days, I wanted to blog about it to make things clearer for our users/potential users out there.

The ideal license model for you will depend on 2 things:

1. How many people will be using the software at your institution or company
2. How intensively it will be used

You have 2 options based on license model (I am ignoring nominated licenses here as this post is concerned with licenses for a whole company or institution and not for individuals/small groups):

1. Campus or Site License
2. Concurrent License

Campus or Site License

The way this works is that you have a maximum number of installations (50/100/150/unlimited).

We provide you with a license server program, which you install, and a license file for the license server (you can check out the instructions for this here). You can then distribute this license file to as many users as you want. What then happens is, these users use the license file to activate the software. Each time a user activates the software, they count as an active user, whether they are using the software or not. When you get to the limit of, for example, 150 people who activated the software, nobody else can activate it.

Concurrent License

These are also known as floating licenses or seats. What you buy is a number of seats for simultaneous usage.

This works as follows: we give you a license server and license file exactly the same as before. An UNLIMITED number of users can activate the software, but only a given number can use it simultaneously. For example, imagine you bought 5 seats – you can have 400 people activated but, at any given time, only 5 can use it. If an additional user tries to use it at that time, they get a message saying the licenses are taken up and they have to try later. (One important aspect to consider is that the lack of limitations for installation is a particularity of Mestrelab, concurrent licenses from other vendors may limit BOTH the number of installations and the simultaneous usage)

• Advantages: This is a cheap alternative if you have a very high number of installations with people who hardly ever use the software

• Disadvantages: If people use the software quite intensively, they will soon take up the available licenses and this results in disruption for other users, who cannot access it when they need it. The other disadvantage is that people have to be connected to the network to be able to use the software, as they need the license server to release a license to them. (This is not entirely true, a seat could be booked to an user if requested from the license server administrator and granted, but of course, this will tie that seat up for the whole period that user has requested).

Our advice.

So, which license you need depends on the 2 parameters I included at the beginning. For academia, we don’t find concurrent licenses work well, as too many people use the software too much and the prices are very much biased towards making the software available to everyone/everywhere/everytime (for the price of approximately 10 seats you can buy an unlimited campus license, and for a 150 user license you can buy around 7 seats – the chances in a community like yours are that more than 7 people will need to use the software at the same time on a regular basis). In industry, this is not so cut and dry.

You can find the prices of all these license packages at our store.

You can read more on the types of licenses here:

• What are campus licenses and why should I have them?
• Should I have concurrent or nominated licenses?

Of course, should you have any questions or love the license model so much you have to buy a license, just write to us at sales@mestrelab.com.

Santi marketing licenses, packages, store No comments Leave a comment