Collaborations are made extremely easy by the e-nnovate interface. Your e-nnovate account contains unlimited sub-accounts for collaborators you can invite to participate in your research.

Of course if they have their own accounts it is that easy, too: You can let them view your material, allow them to make comments or even give them full access so they work on a topic with you. And you can grant different access levels to different pieces of your data and information.

You can also stay abreast of what your collaborators are writing, whether they have new entries and get a sense of how your common projects are progressing.

Illustrative Case #1: The many projects

Nick has begun working on his thesis project and is collecting data and storing it in an e-nnovate e-notebook. His advisor is gone often on various government advisory committees, but Nick's thesis requires a lot of feedback from his advisor, which would slow him down significantly. To solve this problem he has given full access to his advisor (who is not yet an e-nnovate user) who can see his work and comments on the various analysis he performs on a regular basis since it only requires internet access and no special software.

This could present a problem however: Nick is also working on finishing a paper from the old lab he used to work on. He is also working on the side to start an internet company which is developing a plan for revolutionizing the way scientific information is stored. His advisor is aware of his "extra-curricular" activities, but Nick is sure that seeing them on a regular basis is not going to help their rapport. Also, he does not want his business partners and old laboratory buddies to see his work, before he has had a chance to publish.

Nick uses the many access options of e-nnovate interface to his advantage: He gives his advisor full access to his thesis information. He then creates a new topic and stores the information related to the old paper and gives access to his old lab connections, one of whom is an e-nnvate user and together they begin working on the paper. His business partners can see his journal of ideas where they have an ongoing discussion about what the company can incorporate into its product.

Illustrative Case #2: The "Organic" lab

The Wong lab has had many visitors over the past year: multiple undergraduates, visiting researchers and rotating graduate students have come and gone. Despite lab rules which asked that students write their findings in the lab-notebooks, the result was a giant box of lab-notebooks containing information about multiple projects that each individual was involved in.

Much resources had been spent on multiple projects, but it appeared that no-one really knew what the status of each project is. To counter this, the Wong lab made the decision to organize their scientific work using e-nnovate lab notebooks. Dr. Wong considered using a rigid automated "Electronic Lab Notebook" but the students and researchers in his lab were each working on different projects all of which used different protocols that were constantly changing. Dr. Wong needed a more dynamic system, but one that allowed things to retain some continuity. It had to be something that organized the work of the lab but that allowed his students and researchers the freedom to organize their information in the way they are used to. e-nnovate was a perfect fit:

The lab would create a new topic each time there was a new project to work on. In the lab meeting, the people interested in the project would be given access to that specific topic. As people came and went, the topic would continue to grow with their experiences, comments, data and experiments. And all the individuals involved could view the information from their desk or home without having to fight over the same lab-notebook. They could even add entries at the same time. This not only helped make the contributions of each student meaningful, but allowed the PI to track the progress of projects and have a better idea of what project required more people to move forward.