Beginning with the next version, users of Panara will have a community forum.

A place for sharing information, asking for help, reporting bugs, discussing the future direction of the program and pretty much everything else.

In fact the forum is already up and running but is currently only available to a couple of practices that are trialing a newer version of Panara.

One big problem with trying to establish an online community is that unless there is content nobody will visit but unless people visit there will be no content.

When even the forum that exists to serve all Irish dentists is fairly quiet it’s going to be a challenge for a forum that serves a subset of this gain momentum.

But if members have confidence that their post will receive attention then they will be more likely to take the trouble to post.

So in order to achieve this, there will be a discreet information panel about the forum at the bottom of the patient record card in Panara.

This panel will give the date and time of the latest post on the forum and also the username of the poster.

Moving the mouse over this panel will reveal both a link to the forum itself and also access to the forum registration window.

The forum is private to panara users and cannot be viewed by anyone who has not registered via Panara.

Given that the number of times a day Panara users will typically look at patient record cards it’s unlikely that any post will go unread for long.

How this will all play out is obviously as yet unknown but there’s no harm envisioning an optimistic scenario where the forum will come to be seen as important in helping users with their everyday issues and in guiding the ongoing development of the software itself.