switching from ES to go chartless

[babysilvertooth]

HI I wasn't sure if ES is still a good product. It is June and I still haven't got my new verison yet. I want to be 'chartless' by 2011 and am considering OD. I have heard opinions that ES is still a 'good product'. I am looking for any switchers and their opinions, and then some guidance for steps to go 'chartless'.
Besides the 'open' part of OD, what did you see as advantages to going with OD vs. Eaglesoft?
ON my initial impression I have seen the 'chart' module which looks nice with all the information on one screen, like tooth chart, progress notes, images, etc. Under images; does OD pull in the xrays via a bridge? RIght now, I have ES and Dexis, and Dexis has an integrator, but we still click back and forth between the two...not bad and is working for us...I wondered how OD works.
If you have 'images' in OD, does it make the database huge?

I probably still have a ton of questions that I am sorting out before making the move to 'chartless'. Thanks

[nathansparks]

Similar bridging behavior, images that are stored in OD are not stored in the database, but in a shared file folder. The folder will be exactly the same size as the sum of the sizes of the individual files.

[babysilvertooth]

So the shared folder resides on the server, and OD just 'links' to the images? SO the images are free to be used by other programs? So my large Jpeg photos files won't bog down OD, right?

RIght now, I keep patient photos on the server, then just bring up on the computer screen,because ES bogs down with big photo files (is slow to open the file,etc)..I don't know where ES keeps the image (ie in the database or elsewhere, so I end up making smaller file types to store in ES images). I just want to make sure that if I am going to keep patient photos in the chart module of OD that the files will be big but wont' slow down OD....

Thanks

[drtech]

no, it doesn't slow it down at all on file size...you can put many many pictures images in with no problems. Once you get a very large number, it does get hard to locate stuff (something that could be a feature request to filter out old images or something when you just want the most recent)...but the size of the image will not slow it at all. just the time it takes your network to load it when you want to use it.

[jordansparks]

It should be simple to test the speed on your network with the available trial version of Open Dental.