Deprecating Dictionary Manager from the end of this February 2023

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Hello Community,

Managing medical terminologies has been a challenge for our users for many years - but together we have made huge gains in the last 3 years! We are now seeing that both technical and non-developer folks are increasingly using tools like OCL to manage their concepts and semantic coding. This momentum is largely thanks to the successful pilot of the OpenMRS Dictionary Manager webapp, which taught us a lot about the power of making concept management more friendly and accessible.

Our colleagues in the OpenConceptLab community have been walking this journey with us. Much of the ease-of-use lessons we learned have been applied to the OCL Term Browser product over the last year. This has made us ask: Should the OpenMRS community really continue to maintain a separate webapp, when OCL can be used instead? Especially given that we need to focus our resources on our core competency: An EMR for low-resource settings.

So, we would like to inform you that we will be deprecating the OpenMRS Dictionary Manager application starting from the end of this February 2023, and then we will fully shut down the application starting this April 2023. This means that we will no longer be providing any updates, bug fixes, or support for the application.

We have decided to encourage OpenMRS users to use OCL as this has many features and an increasingly user-friendly UI. Dictionary Manager shares the same backend with OCL so current Dictionary Manager users can switch to using the OCL Term Browser at any time, using the same login credentials.

We appreciate your understanding and support as we move forward with our plans. And, we celebrate together that the Dictionary Manager has been a success - it has helped us grow together with OCL and identify a terminology-management future that is both more sustainable and user-friendly for both communities.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and feel free to reach out to the OpenMRS OCL squad or a talk post, if you have any difficulties switching to OCL.

@grace @paynejd @jamlung @dkayiwa @ibacher @akanter @burke @ball @michaelbontyes @muhima08 @jwnasambu @hadijah315 @merovingienne @aojwang @wamz @nischith @dev3 @dev4 @dev5

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Thank you @suruchi! And a huge shout out to the OCL for OpenMRS Squad that has been a home for a truly collaborative partnership between OpenMRS and OCL over the last several years. I want to echo what @suruchi said, retiring the Dictionary Manager app actually marks a big success and is worth celebrating! Too many features to list here have been introduced into the OCL TermBrowser based on what we have learned from the Dictionary Manager. While there is still much to do to make the OCL TermBrowser an intuitive tool for the management of OpenMRS concept dictionaries, it is now capable of handling many concept dictionary management needs. Look forward to continuing to collaborate with all of you there…

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Thank you @suruchi for letting us know and kudos to the entire Dictionary Manager team/squad for coming this far.

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