Open Dental Forum

I've spent a few hours doing research on alternative products and your product seems most promising. I come from an IT background and being ignorant of the dental practice management software industry only in the last few days of talking with technical support at various vendors did I realize how many of the software packages expect you to disregard security and just give everyone domain administrator rights and just not worry about it. My questions are as follows:

Will Open Dental work with a Windows 2008 R2 Server and Windows 7 Professional (64-bit) workstations in a Active Directory domain environment?

Can the Open Dental users at the Windows 7 workstations remain "standard users" with just those rights and privileges or do they need elevated privileges from "power user" or "local administrator" to run Open Dental or modify its configuration?

Redundancy with standby databases is mentioned on your website. How difficult and with what caveats is such a deployment possible? (Considering the Windows 2008 R2 Servers and Active Directory environment)


We are looking to go to digital x-rays and paperless and the two most pressing questions are:

Will Open Dental work with the Scanex system? Are there caveats in general or under certain conditions to be considered?

Can we use Windows 7 tablet pcs for chairside charting or would something else be more recommended? (We are a pediatric dentistry and reliability & speed are of essence)


I appreciate all your help in advance.

Even with Open Dental, it's easier to disregard security and just give everyone admin rights. But yes, you can use standard users for the most part. The following limitations apply:
1. The first time you run OD after installation, you will need to run as admin.
2. Updating the version of OD will require running around to each computer and loggin in as admin to perform the update. Either that, or learn how to push our msi files out to the workstations.
3. Some imaging programs that we bridge to require admin. And in those cases, you usually need to run OD as admin in order for the bridge to work.

Redundancy can exist at many different levels:
1. Simple backups can be run every 10 minutes without a problem, only backing up the changes. This assumes an intelligent version control backup like CrashPlan. There could be a variety of strategies for switching to the backup.
2. Slave database can be kept synched to within a few seconds of master. Manual rollover if master fails. See replication in our manual. There could be a variety of strategies for switching to the backup.
3. A few offices have tried automatic rollover successfully. I've seen Windows Cluster used for this. We have no experience with something this advanced.

Open Dental will work with software, not hardware. You will need an imaging program to support your ScanX hardware. Some examples are here: http://www.opendental.com/manual/programlinks.html

Yes, Windows 7 tablets work great. Make sure the screen is at least 1024x768.