Upgrade from ancient version -- what to look out for?

[lennox]

First: Thank you, Jordan, for such a great piece of software.

My wife's practice has been happily chugging away on v.7.0.11 for some time now, and I've been loathe to update it for fear of disrupting the practice. I know this is now an ancient version, but my wife doesn't like change. By the way, the lack of upgrading is a tribute to how fantastic this software is, and has been for some time.

I am a bit concerned upgrading from 7 -> 12, since it is a huge jump in revision levels. We use Tesia & SmileReminder presently, which both integrate directly with OpenDental. I am considering updating to 12.4, but wanted to know if there is anything I should look out for when upgrading. For example, will I need to upgrade the Tesia or SmileReminder software, are there other things that may have problems during the database conversion?

A few of the features that I am excited to get are Quickbooks integration and ccanning EOBs (we use a document management system right now for these). I'm sure there are alot of other new features and improvements we'll find.

Any insight anyone has on pitfalls to watch out for, or problems we may see with the upgrade would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Lennox

[jsalmon]

Make sure every computer in your office has .NET 3.5 AND 4 installed. We provide links here: http://opendental.com/manual/dotnet.html
Once that is done you can update to v12.X.
You will get a warning message about upgrading to MySQL 5.5. Ignore that for now and make sure to connect every workstation up to Open Dental so that all of your workstations have the new v12 version running.
Once that is done, update the MySQL to version 5.5. DONE!
If you feel nervous about any of these steps feel free to give us a call, that is what we are here for. We do these kinds of upgrades all day long!