Graphics Day

I spent part of this week in the Graphics Department here learning about what each person there does, and how they use their computers, and what we can possibly do in IT to make their jobs easier or more efficient at least.

MS Office for the Mac
We really need to purchase this. The guys in graphics get files often from clients and CS Reps that are either word, or Powerpoint documents, and each time they do, they go over to the PCs and try to figure out how they will get them on the Macs. This seems silly to me, so I plan to ask for a copy for at least two of the guys there.

Pitstop
Some of the guys in the department use Pitstop, but some can't because there are not enough licenses. Again, this is silly . . . they should all have it or none should use it. I have some digging to do there, and the manager says he has a plan?

Memory
The main designer has an older Mac now than some of them, and he appears to need a bit more for the intense graphics programs he uses.

Files and Their Usage
A couple of things here that I am still considering . . . but they have a consistency problem, a storage problem, and a process problem. First, they have one guy who is creating a job with a standard set of folders and names, and another two that aren't following this system. I would like to encourage them to standardize this all. Second, the guy who has a standard way of doing things, is copying all of the fonts that he uses in a job into the job folder, which is somewhat wasteful of resources, as we already have all the fonts in our fonts folder. We are then taking up extra room on the server, and in many cases the fonts can't be used this way and get corrupt as well. Finally, we seem to copy all of our graphics files in several locations, which again, seems to leave much room for error and also wastes our limited resources. CS Reps put the graphics file in CRPublic. Graphics Guys open and create a set of Job files on the Graphics Server. When they are finished they put a copy of the files in the PDF to Email folder (in CR Public folder). I need to think on this some more . . . but this seems wasteful to me.