In Hand and Well ManagedTim Rhodus, Professor

Department of Horticulture & Crop Science The Ohio State University

Online at: webgarden.osu.edu/buckeye2013.pdf

Have you received an email newsletter or browsed a website that would be helpful in your business the next time a customer asks about a specific plant, pest or product? Do you have a pile of papers, photos, newspaper or magazine stories stacked on your desk waiting to be shared with employees? Lastly, have you had a great idea come to mind or seen something that was interesting and not be able to write it down or capture the experience?

I think these three situations describe where many of us currently exist both professionally and personally - plenty of important information that needs to be archived and retrieved later, arriving in numerous formats and often times showing up unexpectedly. In addition, because we (and our customers) are becoming increasingly mobile, it is important that this collection be accessible 24/7 from a smart phone or tablet.

In this article, I will present some of our past projects aimed at collecting and organizing information for the benefit of businesses, institutions and individuals who are interested in horticulture. I will discuss some of the current trends in online services and mobile apps aimed at providing answers to your questions and close with a discussion of Evernote, a cloud application that allows you to design and develop your own solution for keeping all of your content in hand and well managed.

THE WEALTH OF THE INTERNET

In 1997, our team created the Factsheet Database Search website. This site allowed users to:

“Search the Internet for information related to horticulture and crop science from 50 different colleges and universities across the United States and Canada. Over 13,000 pages of information are frequently updated in order to provide the most concentrated source of plant-related information available for answering your questions, assisting you in gaining an education, or helping you teach others about plants.”

At that time, there were a handful of competing search engines under development but the idea of a custom search for just horticultural fact sheets and bulletins from across the U.S. and Canada was a unique contribution to early Horticulture online services.

During the spring and summer of 1998, a project was developed to explore the feasibility of combining frequently asked questions (FAQs) gathered from nursery managers at The Andersons, Inc. General Stores located in Columbus and Maumee, Ohio with selected fact sheets indexed by the Factsheet Database and assembled in a 3-ring binder that was located at each of the stores for employee use. Weekly questions were compiled and submitted to Dr. Rhodus and his team who browsed the web and identified appropriate fact sheets that could be copied and sent back to each store. By the end of the season, a total of 80 fact sheets were assembled as supporting information for garden center employees dealing with questions like, “How do I care for strawberries?” to “How do I remove Poison Ivy?”

This early attempt to organize information from the Internet for use by garden center employees relied on a 3-ring binder consisting of weekly packets of documents sent through the post office. While not too speedy, this project was designed to assemble a custom set of documents (fact sheets selected for their relevance to recent customer inquiries) in a format (notebook) for the benefit of those who needed to share the information with customers on an “as needed” basis.

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WEBSITES THAT ANSWER QUESTIONS

Plantfacts Garden Tips - plantfacts.osu.edu/faq/

By 2003, our team had expanded the Factsheet Database to the PlantFacts collection of digital and online resources.

The layout for each GardenTips article included:

• Question• Answer• Photo (usually)• Links to OSUE

publications• Links to other

websites• Pre-programmed

search of our Factsheet Database and

• Short assessment question

Over the years, other websites have been created to handle horticulture-related questions. As a designer of online collections, it is interesting to examine the: degree of integration with other resources on the Internet (or their own site), ease of finding information, integration with mobile devices and advertising. Of course, getting the answer right is the most important feature of a good FAQ site but after that, what else does the site offer? Let’s take a look at two other current sites.

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eXtension - extension.org/horticulture/faqs

Pronounced e-extension, this site is the national portal for gathering and presenting online resources from Extension, in all states. The “one look” for all Extension sites was developed in order to bring out the the best of the best from partner institutions. Watch out on this site, browsing a topic can quickly turn from reading Answers to reading Articles or News or Resources. The separation of content types is very thin and not at all obvious. This uncertainty is compounded by the wide variation in topics being presented - this is not just a gardening, horticulture or crops resource.

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Better Homes and Gardens - bhg.com/advice/gardening

As for content, BHG.com is sitting on a gold mine due to their Better Homes and Gardens magazine being the 4th best selling magazine in the U.S. BHG does a good job of keeping the gardening content separate from other sections as you browse their articles. External links, especially to University resources are nonexistent. Watch out for the pop-up ads, they are lurking everywhere.

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TAGS THAT DIRECT YOU TO CONTENT

Over the past two years, I have written “Rise of the Mobile Apps” [View] and “Scanning For New Technology: QR Code” [View] in The Buckeye. These stories discussed the popularity of mobile apps and using QR (or other 2D barcodes) on plant tags.

In this example, scanning the Microsoft Tag (lower right corner) with the Microsoft Tag app on a smart phone takes you to the Lowe’s website formatted appropriately for a cell phone user. While not actually a FAQ resource, the interaction between the tag and website makes a very effective experience for the user.

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EVERNOTE - DEVELOP YOUR OWN SOLUTION

I started this article talking about the challenge of managing information. That was followed with a discussion of our Andersons’ project in 1998 designed to support a garden center’s customer service program. I then presented three examples of websites that contain answers to frequently asked garden questions. Lastly, I discussed the use of QR codes to automatically link a customer to detailed information provided by a retailer.

Now, let’s see what is missing in this environment. None of the examples presented allow one to assemble/organize in-house and online information into a customized archive that can be accessed using an app on a smart phone or tablet or using a browser on a laptop or workstation. I’m NOT talking about a list of favorite web links on a piece of paper, in a notebook or on a website but a fully-indexed and searchable system that allows a manager, a supervisor, a training specialist or any interested individual to EASILY send content to the system with appropriate tags that simplify searching the collection.

This is Evernote on my desktop or laptop computer using the free Evernote software for creating, editing and organizing Notebooks and Notes. The software can be downloaded from: evernote.com. Copying a web page into Evernote is handled by downloading the Evernote web clipper plugin for Safari, Firefox, Chrome or Explorer browser programs on Mac or PC.

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This is the Evernote app on my iPad. Things look a little different but everything is up-to-date with the software version because the Evernote service is a “cloud” service that can keep all your devices (Mac and PC) computers or (iPad/iPhone and Android) mobile devices synchronized to your account settings.

Adding a new note is simple and just clicking on “Add Note” button and starting to type. Pictures and other files (PDF, Word, PPT, Excel or audio) can ALL be attached to the same note. I mentioned above the use of the web clipper plugin. This allows you to browse a web page and click a button in your browser software to send the current page (or just and article) to your Evenote account. My favorite option for creating a new note is to forward an email message to an Evernote email address belonging to my account. That way, I can immediately send the content of an email newsletter to my favorite Evernote Notebook. My other favorite is to take an article from the Buckeye Yard and Garden onLine Newsletter [View] and click on the Clip to Evernote link. Once again, the article is immediately sent to my Evernote account.

SHARING YOUR NOTEBOOKS

So far, I’ve only talked about authoring or collecting articles, documents and photos to my own Notebooks (no limit on creating Notebooks). However, any Notebook (and its content can be shared to other Evernote users. This would be very appropriate for employees in a garden center, nursery, or landscape company to see what others are posting and to share their postings. Each person can be allowed authoring and editing

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permissions. This way, the collection of Notes can be grown and expanded over time to include ALL the situations that employees or customers frequently ask about. Sharing of a Note can also be on the web or sent to a Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn account.

USING EVERNOTE

Now that you have started collecting/creating Notes (in one or more Notebooks) and added one or more Tags to help catalog key topics, it is time to realize the benefits of Evernote - searching for content. As soon as a Note is created and synchronized to your account, the content can be found on any of your Evernote-enabled devices and by anyone with whom you share a Notebook. For example, assume you are tracking customer questions about plants in the home landscape. Begin the process by adding a Note for each question. Identify appropriate resources from the Internet and “clip” the website pages that will be helpful. This phase is very beneficial, combining web clipping with authoring your own Notes using your expertise on the subject and/or that of your employees. Now, you have the ability to retrieve ALL Notes under a single keyword or doing a text search and finding all notes matching that keyword.

This is the exciting part about creating your own Evernote Customer Resource Center or Garden Journal or Plant Encyclopedia. By using Evernote, you create a fully searchable index that is online, mobile-friendly, visually appealing and totally under your control. No need to wait on other websites to address your questions or figure out that they need photos to properly inform others how to identify a plant or a pest. With Evernote, you can create the type of “Answer” that contains what you wish others would publish.

While I have much more to say about the use of Evernote, this article has reached its limit. Over the next few months, I will be developing a Portfolio course for the Ohio State iTunes U service at: itunes.osu.edu This is an open course and available for anyone at no cost. The lessons and examples will be developed for using Evernote to create an academic portfolio. However, the same instructions would easily allow one to create a Gardening Q&A Resource, a Garden Journal or an Employee training solution. Good luck!!!

InVirtual Perspective Technology Team...

The OSU inVirtual Perspective Technology Team consists of Dr. Tim Rhodus, Professor; Bud Witney, Systems Manager, and Elaine Eberlin, Systems Specialist. The team is responsible for the design and maintenance of the systems, databases, and much of the content contained in the numerous web sites positioned within Horticulture in Virtual Perspective, OSU PlantFacts, and American Society for Horticultural Science. Online access to this document is available at: http://hvp.osu.edu/buckeye2013.pdf

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