EZ 2000 - Central Management

Central Enterprise Management Tool

This is part of Version 12.0.

Customers with Multiple Locations have the option to choose to use separate databases for each location.  For this scenario, it is beneficial to be able to use a centrally located management tool to interact with all of these separate databases.  For this to work, every location must be on the same version of EZ2000 Plus Dental.  All the offices would need to be on a single VPN. Or, if you have decided to use the Middle Tier at each location for increased security, then you could either connect over the VPN or over https.

Technical Description
The Central Manager is a separate exe that is shipped and installed in the same EZ2000 Plus Dental folder as the main program.  When the Central Manager is launched, the first thing it will do is to connect to a local mostly blank EZ2000 Plus Dental database which we will refer to as dbcentral.  Dbcentral will not have any patient information in it, and most of the normal tables will not be used.  The Central Manager also has some of its own tables in dbcentral that are ignored by the ordinary EZ2000 Plus Dental program.

Connection
In order to use the Central Manager, you must create a text file called CentralManagerConfig.xml. The contents of the file should look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ConnectionSettings> <DatabaseConnection> <ComputerName>localhost</ComputerName> <Database>dbcentral</Database> <User>root</User> <Password></Password> </DatabaseConnection> </ConnectionSettings>

with changes to the ComputerName and Database as needed.  Remember that this should be a mostly blank database.  There is probably one you can use as a starting point in your database folder.  The config file above does not have any user interface.  This is in contrast to the config file for the main program (FreeDentalConfig.xml), which has the Choose Database window as a user interface. 

Main Window

Security
The Central Manager requires a password in order to launch.  The password is contained in dbcentral as a hash. A hash means that there is no possible way to decrypt the password by looking in the database, and there is no way to recover a lost password other than deleting it from the database directly.  Click the Setup Password button at the top of the main window to change the password. Enter "I'm admin" in the first box as shown.

Because dbcentral also contains information about multiple connections including encrypted passwords, it is advisable to place extra security around the mysql installation.  This can be done by editing the mysql service and changing the logon information from local system to a specific user.  The database files can then be encrypted by Windows while still allowing the mysql service to run when the proper Windows user is logged in.

Connections
Click the Setup Connections button at the top.

Launcher
Double click on any connection in the main window to launch a separate instance of EZ2000 Plus Dental connected to the chosen database.  The launcher makes use of Command Line Arguments.

Future Improvements

Query Aggregation
If the user provided a query, it could be run against each database in sequence, and then all of the results aggregated  into single result table.  This would be analogous to a UNION.

Query by Connection
The user would provide a query that returned one row. The result would show each connection in the first column, followed by the results in the other columns.  In other words, the data would be broken down by connection.  This would be analogous to a LEFT JOIN.

Reports
A variety of built-in reports could be added over time. The reports could use both of the above strategies as well as others.

Fee Schedules
Fee schedules could be transferred between any databases as well as sent to multiple databases simultaneously.

Settings
Settings such as Definitions, Procedure Buttons, and Sheets could be transferred between databases.