The JCMS Colony Management System

JCMS Community Forum
Have your questions answered by JCMS professionals


The Jackson Laboratory's Colony Management System (JCMS) is a multi-user relational database management system for managing animal colonies in a research environment. It was initially developed in response to increased demand within The Jackson Laboratory for a system that would execute the core functionality of colony management from an intuitive, easy-to-use interface. Since its first release in 1999, it has been continually improved through community input. For an overview of JCMS, please visit our Overview page.

Download the latest release of JCMS:  v3.4.1 (released Nov 16, 2009) 

Upgrade to the latest release

The JCMS Upgrader are not yet available for v3.4.1 (end of year release).

The JCMS Upgrader to the previous release is available.

Convert your JCMS database to MySQL

The Jackson Laboratory is happy to report that we now provide a tool that will take your JCMS version 3.X installation and automatically migrate it to a MySQL backend while retaining your familiar JCMS user interface. Note that this works on JCMS versions 3.0.1 and higher. If your version of JCMS is 2.X, you may use our automatic upgrade utility to bring it forward to the latest version.

JCMS Pedigree Tracking tool

JCMS Users Survey - Your input is important to us; JCMS development is user driven. We periodically review results of this survey to help us develop our strategic plans. Thank you in advance for your input.