At the Dutch Institute For Fundamental Energy Research (DIFFER), we are investigating NOMAD Oasis as a research data management solution. We have an Oasis running and we plan to have a small demo for one of our labs (which would be the pilot for other labs at the institute) in September.
A hurdle we are facing is the UI. With all the sections, subsections and subsubsections, the UI can be a bit unattractive to the user. The PLD facility for which we are developing this aims to create a ‘user facility’, where many different researchers can come and do their measurements. The trouble is that these people do not want to take a week to learn the system, neither do we want that they do not register their metadata in the system.
We have read that NOMAD will rethink the UI. We were wondering about the timeline of that development and if there is a workaround in the meantime (other than building our own front-end on top of the oasis).
Thanks for your interest in using NOMAD for your institute!
We are indeed in the beta phase of releasing our new user interface. You can already take a look at it here to get a first impression of what has changed. The final release in planned for this autumn, most likely end of September/early October.
We have invited now external users to give us feedback on it in Discord, and you are very welcome to join that discussion (see the #software-updates channel).
If you would like to install the new GUI on your Oasis, you can already do so. See the instructions in the Discord (#software-updates channel). The new GUI is designed as a plugin: this way we better separate the GUI from the backend. It is certainly also possible to build a completely custom user interface using the same plugin-approach, but I would not suggest doing it for light reasons: it is probably better if you can give us feedback on how to make the new version better.