Open Dental Forum

This is very cool... I had a few minutes and updated to 13.1. Then I started playing with the Wiki. So cool - take a picture with your camera to illustrate a tray setup, use of a machine, etc. I really like this. I think that you need to add the WIKI button to all of the screens so that it is easily accessed by staff. Then we need a way of importing and exporting our wikis for each other.

I was excited about the Wiki feature but when I look at the manual (Open Dental has made a disclaimer in the bug list that the documentation is incomplete on the Wiki feature) ...

http://www.opendental.com/manual/wiki.html

It makes me feel ignorant to say this but ....it looks like one would have to have some programming experience or at least some experience with html (which I don't) to use the Wiki feature. I know that a lot of Open Dental users are fairly "techie" but many users are not. I feel fairly comfortable in front of a computer and do a lot of my own IT in my office but honestly -- this Wiki feature looks complex. Am I missing something? ... Is it easier than the instructions make it sound?

Any resources someone could recommend to get a basic understanding of the concepts needed to use the Wiki feature would be appreciated?

Thanks,

Jeff

That page does look pretty intimidating. It's basically a look "under the hood" so that advanced users can do all of their extreme makeovers and understand the limits of the sandbox. However, once you start using the wiki, you'll notice that all of this jargon happens automatically when you click the buttons at the top that are accurately labeled. An example would be the Table section. You don't have to know a thing about the rules of the "|| cells" and such because a nice user friendly window will pop up that looks like excel and it will be obvious what is what. But after you leave that window you will see that nasty "|| cell " code and we want you to know what that is so that you don't go manually editing it OR if you do, you know what to expect. Once some screen shots and such get on that page, I'm sure it'll look less frightening.

Right, that page in our manual will be detechified shortly. This is one of those features that would never have been added except that we needed it for ourselves. And as long as we built it, we might as well let everyone use it. But don't worry, we're not wasting our time building features that nobody wants. Internal tools like this are a huge part of increasing efficiency for our company. This tool is just so extremely important to our core activities.