For dental practice management software it is critical for updates to the system to filter to each computer on the network. In this way, staff can see what patients are present at the office, if patients have broken their appointments, or any other changes that can affect the office’s daily routine. Recently I had to deal with this issue at an office using Easy Dental. I had faced this problem before and knew the source of the problem was in the registry.
An easy way to tell if this problem is happening in Easy Dental is to go to the Reports screen and click on the “Practice Setup” icon at the top. This displays a menu whose last entry is “Network Setup.” This entry lets you specify how often updates should occur on this workstation. If this entry is greyed out, you have a problem.
To fix the problem, close Easy Dental on the computer. Then open regedit and go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Easy Dental Systems, Inc.\Easy Dental\NETWORK. Under this key you probably only see one value listed. You will need to create 2 more values: a string value called “NetVersion” (without the quotes) with a value of 1 and a dword value called “UpdateSpeed” (no quotes) with a Hexidecimel value of 15 (the default in seconds). You can adjust the update speed later in the program if needed. This fix was done on Easy Dental 2010, but the procedure should be similar on other versions. You may need to restart the PC for the change to take effect.
To check your fix, open Easy Dental, go back to the Reports section, and click on Network Setup under the Practice Setup icon. Network Setup should no longer be greyed out and should display on update value of 15. You can double-check the fix by making a schedule change on another PC then waiting to see if it updates to the PC you are checking.