Civica WEB EDI Renewal​ and Software upgrade

Description

Civica, are the incumbent contractors and own the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) on the software for Dental EDI web server in NI - they also provide this service for NHS England/Wales who use the same system. EDI is a two-way message broker system between each independent dental practice management system and BSO Dental payments system. This system processes in excess of 140,000 transactions per month. If this service fails, Dental practices will not be paid and the BSO will suffer serious reputational damage. The WebEDI application is written in VB6 and makes use of .NET Framework 2.0 C# components; both of these technologies are no longer supported. VB6 was out of support in 2008 and .NET Framework 2.0 was out of support in 2017. This currently means that no application changes can be made without first porting the application to supported technologies together with an ever-increasing risk that these out-of-date technologies could be subject to cyber-attack. The continued use of an unsupported technology framework poses an increasing risk to the organisation. This change is to migrate the WebEDI application to .NET 8 which will resolve the above concerns and minimise the risk of attack​.​