Security and remote access

[brentwood]

There is a thread about remote access to Open Dental in the "Main Forum". I think this is probably the better place for my question. The architecture of Open Dental is to access the database through database connection from client to server. The OpenDentImages and OpenDentalLetters are through shared drives. I see two issues with this archtecture.

1. Security: database server can be protected by user id/password. But Open Dental itself does not provide a way to change the id/password of the database server. As for the shared drives, anyone who has access to the computers of Open Dental clients has read/write access to the shared drives. So even that person does not have id/passsword to Open Dental. He can do anything to the shared drives.

2. Remote access: It is very difficult to set up different offices to use the same Open Dental server. At least I don't know an easier way to do that. We can open up the database port to access the database server. But there is no way to access the shared drives from a remote location.

I think one way to do this from architecture's view point is to use .NET remoting. We don't access the database directly from the client. We don't access the images/letters drives directly from the client, either. Both of them are through remoting objects. In such a way, we can solve the above two issues. But it may require a lot of achitecture changes.

[jordansparks]

Both of these issues are solved by our web version. It's specifically designed to solve both problems. So that's how we are approaching it for now. We have tried other things in the past, and this might fizzle just like those efforts did. But I think this is our best bet right now. As it evolves, we will start to need to do things like interact with the hardware, and we will probably supplement the web version with a helper program that gets installed.