Calendar Sync with Open Dental

[AronQuest]

Hi,

I've been trying for a while to set up proper calendars sync with Open Dental, and honestly, I'm struggling. Our office uses Google Calendar at the front desk, and the goal is for appointments created in Open Dental to automatically appear there without having to enter everything manually again. I've looked into a few third-party tools that offer calendar sync between practice management software and Google Calendar or Outlook, but I can't figure out whether they actually work well with the version we're running (around 21.x).
My biggest concern is conflict handling when the same appointment gets modified on both sides at roughly the same time. Has anyone here implemented this successfully in a real practice? Did you use a specific module, a custom script, or an external service? I don't want to invest time setting it all up only for it to break after a week.

[saumilshah]

The conflict-handling question is the right one to be stuck on, and I would push it a step further: before designing for conflicts, check whether you actually need two-way at all.

The three sync problems are very different in cost. One-way out of Open Dental into a calendar is mostly a solved problem — you are copying, and if the copy is wrong you rebuild it. Two-way is a different animal, because the moment both sides can edit you need an answer to "these disagree, who wins", and you need it for every field, forever, including the cases nobody thought of. That is not a feature you finish, it is one you maintain.

So the question I would ask the front desk is whether anyone needs to create or change appointments in Google Calendar, or whether they just need to see them. In most offices I have looked at, the honest answer is see — the schedule still lives in the practice software because that is where the operatory, the provider and the ledger are. If that holds for you, one-way and a read-only calendar removes the entire conflict problem rather than solving it, and you will not spend the next two years on reconciliation bugs.

If you genuinely do need two-way, the thing worth deciding on day one is which side is the source of truth, and then being ruthless about it — the failure mode is not usually a dramatic collision, it is a slow drift where each side has been partly right for weeks and nobody noticed. Pick a winner, write it down, and make the losing side rebuildable.

For what it is worth we went strictly one-way for exactly these reasons and have not regretted it.