Open-source Dental Laboratories Web Content Management Systems vs. Commercial Web Content Management Systems

Desktop applications for managing dental laboratories operation are available; however, these applications are not sufficient. Many information need to be shared between dentists, assistant, laboratory technicians and others. With the development of the Internet technology, there is a need for an effective web application to manage such operation and to control accessing this shared information. The Dental Laboratory WCMS would be used as a channel for dentists to technician, dental clinic-to-dental laboratory, to provide the long-distance service. With dental laboratory WCMS, the medical data, pictures and patient records all can be accessible online. Dental laboratories can track and manage lab cases and payments online. Besides, dental clinics and dentists can access to track the lab cases, and they can be notified by email about the status of their lab cases. Both have an account and can view their lab case history, their current balance, and pay bills online. It aids in reducing paperwork and automating the approach to process lab cases. Any dental laboratory can have its own instance of the system to manage its content and to ease communications with dental clinics its working with. The system adopts three layers technical architecture to design the system as in [1]. The main contribution of this paper is to design a simple Web Content Management System (WCMS) for Dental Laboratories and to discuss why there is a need to develop a standalone WCMS for Dental Laboratories whilst other open source WCMSs can be utilized such as Joomla, Drupal and WordPress.