JAX Colony Management System Overview

JCMS Community Forum
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The Jackson Laboratory's Colony Management System (JCMS) is a multi-user relational database management system supporting concurrent user access for managing animal colonies in a research environment.
Since its initial release in 1999, JCMS has been widely used within The Jackson Laboratory and adopted by a number of outside institutions.  The JCMS user group currently includes over 2,000 subscribers.  JCMS functionality is community driven.  Your input is important.  Please join our user forum and tell us what you think. 


Some of the salient features that JCMS offers are:

  • Web interfaces available for some functions (JCMS-Web)
  • Tracking animal status 
  • Line viability monitoring
  • Tracking of animal pedigree
  • Cage card printing
  • Colony status reports
  • Mouse-room work reports
  • Genotype logging
  • Creating mating records
  • Tracking plug dates
  • Creating litter records
  • Animal pen management
  • Experimental data tracking
  • Bulk data entry
  • Advanced database queries
  • Comprehensive mouse sample tracking
  • Support for handheld devices

In its current form, JCMS runs as a Microsoft Access® application with either an Access or MySQL database backend.

We provide user support through the community discussion forum,  and we do announcements through the jaxcms listserv.