Professional Networks: Hortis

Hortis Down Under: join the growing community

Havard Ostgaard and Waheed Arshad, Botanical Software Ltd

In September, Havard (above right) and Waheed (above left) from the Hortis team joined the 7th Global Botanic Gardens Congress with an exhibit and the opportunity to meet with BGANZ member gardens. For us, it is always a pleasure and extremely valuable to our work to talk to existing users and members of the plant records community. We would like to thank everyone who came to our exhibit.

What did we learn?

Technology should be reliable, feel effortless and provide new opportunities; above all, technology should make it easier for botanical collection holders to reach their goals. The concerns and needs of the community are the driving force and inspiration for all the work we do.

Throughout the week, we had the opportunity to demonstrate how we have been rethinking plant records with Hortis, and how an affordable and user-friendly system can benefit the way you manage your collection. In addition to learning more about the specific needs of gardens, our three most important takeaways were:

• the increasing importance of data quality and collaboration

• how COVID-19 has emphasised the benefits of the cloud

• that time is the most common constraint botanic gardens struggle with.

Taking your feedback forward

Many gardens struggle with a range of challenges, including financial constraints, staffing issues, etc., but having sufficient time seems to be a constraint that is shared by everyone. If a tool is too cumbersome, it will remain unused. Through software design, we want to make sure that all users, regardless of their background, can pick up Hortis and get their work done as smoothly and efficiently as possible; a tool that requires extensive training is not a viable option.

As we are a cloud-based platform, we are also able to listen to your feedback, refine the product, and make updates at an increased pace compared with onsite systems. The most impactful part of this story is that we can deploy a new release of Hortis to every user on the planet in about 10 minutes!

With Hortis having been selected as the records management system of choice for BGANZ gardens, we are especially keen to hear feedback from current and prospective users from the community. What is working well at your institution? What workflows are you finding challenging? How would you like the tools to help your record-keeping missions?

BGANZ member discount and grant funding

When signing up to Hortis, you decide on the number of full-time and occasional users (such as part-time staff or volunteers). Hortis is offering all BGANZ members double the capacity of full-time users for their first year at no additional cost.

Some features that have been recently released in Hortis: tags to organise your records, the ability to add plant materials directly from the home page, and the ability to see images in conjunction with the mapped plant materials.

There may also be funding available for botanic gardens based in Victoria. If you think this applies to your garden or for more information about this BGANZ grant scheme, contact Tex Moon (terence.moon@parks.vic.gov.au).

Ready to onboard Hortis?

If you believe this is a good time to see how Hortis can help you and your garden, get in touch with the team at info@hortis.com or sign-up for a trial today on www.hortis.com/trial.

You can also keep track of our feature updates, all of which can be found in our Release Notes.

We look forward to welcoming you aboard a growing community of gardens across the region.

The number of gardens using Hortis for their plant records is growing weekly. This map shows the community in the state of Victoria alone.