Elsevier Reaxys

Simple concept, powerful output. Find forums, threads, topics and responses in seconds

Users can define how the forum works. Everything can be personalized

You need reporting when it comes to forums. The Reaxys Forums tells administrators the what,who and the when

"Jean and his team at Gatelets are a pleasure to work with, not only because they are very responsive and provide a great service at a good value, but also because of his creative ideas and understanding of the business. This makes the development process from ideation to implementation very easy and guarantees a speedy delivery of results, an important requirement these days"

Juergen Swienty-Busch, Head of Product Management, Elsevier Reaxys - Frankfurt

Objectives

The Reaxys team is one of the most intelligent and online-aware groups of people we have met. These guys build software enabling scientists to search for information using chemical reactions and 2D structures. Pretty darn cool. They approached Gatelets because we have some skills in the chemistry online space. The request was simple: we want a user forum for the Reaxys Product. The implementation was a challenge. Why? Well, the Reaxys product has its own specific user and group authentication system. The intention was to have us create and host a forum that is decoupled from the Reaxys product (because forums are not an inherent part of the Reaxys product), however users that are within the Reaxys product should not be required to login again. Additionally, the intention was not to replicate any user databases etc. - the idea was that the Reaxys product would maintain the "master list" and we would somehow need to be able to determine if the user should have access or not. The users also should be able to access the forum and maintain their own personal settings.

The Reaxys team also wanted a clean and minimalist design that would "fit" the Reaxys product look and feel. (i.e. not feel alien to a Reaxys user)

What we did

Gatelets developed a clean, high performance forum environment that 100% met the objectives listed above. We can't go into authentication details, however the system performs some interesting "magic" (Oh, no, there are no Web services or lookup tables). Working with a team in Frankfurt, we were able to create the Reaxys forum system in 30 days.

Users in the Reaxys product can access all the forum areas (that they should have access to) without having to login again
Users can maintain personal settings including: alias, editor types, layouts, and much more...
Administrators can create forum categories and topics with ease. Special utilities enable them to highlight certain topics using icons.
Ability to create sticky messages
Ability for users to watch topics and threads - they are automatically notified when things change
Various HTML editor types help users create formatted content
Attach files in threads and responses
Really powerful full text search
Administrators can view an extensive set of reports - top posters, key topics, hot issues etc.
Gatelets 100% hosts, monitors, supports and maintains the Reaxys forums— this enables the Reaxys team to get on with the important work they have with the Reaxys product

Where does the relationship stand?

Gatelets continues to support, maintain and monitor the forums. As seen by Juergen's testimonial above, Gatelets maintains a fantastic relationship with the Reaxys team.

Reaxys.com Reed Elsevier