Customer Story
ABEL Soft
Medical & Dental Software Solutions
For over 20 years, ABELSoft has been the leading provider of practice management software for dental offices in the health care industry. Their comprehensive solution is called ABELDent, and it supports all the clinical and business operations for dental offices.
Their software is used in over 30% of the dental offices across Canada. And ABELSoft’s team of 50+ employees is now also supporting their growing client base in the US.
KEY TECHNOLOGIES USED
- Azure App Service
- Azure Application Insights
- Azure Devops
- Power BI
- Azure SQL Database
BUSINESS PROBLEM
The original ABELDent software was an on-premise solution. So it required server hardware and software running onsite in each dental office. “It was difficult for small offices to handle things like maintaining servers and installing software updates,” said Arun Rele, President of ABELSoft. “In some cases, they just skipped upgrades altogether. So they missed out on new features we had developed”.
That also meant they missed out on important security updates. That made those dental offices increasingly vulnerable to data breaches, malware threats and even ransomware attacks. Those threats to privacy and security were a huge concern.
So ABELSoft started looking for a new way to deliver their upgrades: one that would reduce or eliminate the need for staff in the dental offices to update their local servers.
That is when ABELSoft enlisted the help of the software development experts at ObjectSharp (a Gold Cloud Platform company, and a top Microsoft Azure Partner).
“ObjectSharp helped us upgrade our flagship software system and move it to the Azure Cloud. That has made our clients’ data much more secure, and the operation of our software much more scalable,” Anita McKay, Chief Architect, ABELSoft
HOW WE HELPED OUR CLIENT
After ObjectSharp studied the ABELDENT software architecture, they recommended engineering it to become a SaaS offering in the Azure cloud. That would deliver immediate benefits: from higher security to the ability to deliver new functionality without any updates required by the staff in the dental offices.
“Our system deals with personal health data. And the high level of security provided by Azure – including encrypting documents and database records – allows us to comply with regulations like HIPAA in the US. So we were happy to take ObjectSharp’s recommendation to re-engineer our software for the Cloud”, said Anita McKay, Chief Architect at ABELSoft.
ObjectSharp helped them migrate clients’ on-premise SQL Server database to an Azure SQL Database in the cloud. And then moved the associated back-end API, built on .NET WCF services, to Azure AppService. The new multi-tenant, cloud-based solution maintains all the features of the original on-premise solution. And it has a new UI interface to improve usability.
In addition to moving to the cloud, ObjectSharp showed the ABELSoft team how to improve its internal development operations. “Working with ObjectSharp, we learned how to improve our entire CI/CD delivery pipeline. We’ve gone from asking our clients to deploy new versions every two months, to doing it for them every two weeks with the new SaaS version of our product”, said Anita McKay.