At Sparktivity, we believe that your work-product must be organized and protected above all else. For creative businesses and professionals, the sheer size and volume of digital files being produced from daily work tasks can quickly become overwhelming! Multiply that by a large number of users and again by the number of years a business or group has been operating, and the result can be a disaster.

Are you or your team facing issues like:

• An inability to retrieve old projects, 100% complete with supporting files like fonts, stock photography, audio segments, or video clips?
• No consistent, reliable method for saving project changes over time, including total version control allowing instant rollback to earlier project stages?
• Inefficient asset searches across a sea of hard drives, network volumes, backup tapes, or one-off optical discs?
• Burning precious hours on labor-intensive, repetitive tasks to organize your project files?
• Losing critical knowledge on “where things are” when a team member leaves the organization?

The solution to these common problems is to combine detailed naming and sorting guidelines with easy-to-use functionality already available in today’s modern client and server operating systems.

Sparktivity has developed and deployed a heavy-duty file naming & storage system which is cross-platform, non-proprietary and future-proof, helping creative professional organizations gain control over their assets.

Let Sparktivity customize our solution to your organization’s specific needs, helping your team name, store, and retrieve their valuable work-product - quickly and reliably.

Sparktivity always recommends industry-standard protections like firewalling the internal network from the Internet, frequent workstation scanning to detect malware, securing wireless networks against data intercepts, and timely installation of software security patches.

Beyond rudimentary measures applicable to all businesses, Sparktivity provides guidance to creative professional organizations needing more than just the basics.

Sparktivity has addressed many mainstream and auxiliary security issues with solutions including:

• Configuration and deployment of network security appliances from leading hardware vendors.
• Installation and configuration of anti-virus and anti-spyware tools from Microsoft, McAfee, Symantec, Grisoft, Safer Networking Limited, and The ClamAV Project.
• Implementation of comprehensive facility security, including workstation, server, and peripheral protection against unauthorized access, theft, extreme temperature, and power interruption.
• Training users to defend against common social engineering tactics designed to reveal sensitive company information like personnel lists, security procedures, and system passwords.
• Modification of user security policies to limit administrator-level workstation access, and to require regular password rotation.
• Vetting and selection of vendors providing offsite storage and rotation of critical backup and archival media.
• Deployment of centralized software management tools, enabling continuous auditing of licensing compliance for total legal protection against infringement claims.
• Preservation of financial resources via the utilization of open-source and free software where suitable, and by the consolidation of all major proprietary software to volume licensing with maintenance agreements.

From environmental and social protections to legal, data, and budgetary safeguards, Sparktivity can protect your team with strategies to secure overlooked failure points not commonly thought of as IT security vulnerabilities.

Master artisans reveal the full range of their creativity by developing total control over their tools. In the digital age, the creative professional’s toolbox can contain specific software applications, information about a team’s workflow, and detailed knowledge about industry best-practices.

Sparktivity leads one-on-one or group training sessions covering a wide range of tools, helping creative professionals energize their skills and gain a competitive edge. Our sessions are accessible, direct, easy to digest, and portable for offline study after the session is over.

We provide training curriculum and instruction on topics including:

• Workstation software from leading vendors of creative pro applications.
• Industry best-practices for print production, photography, web development, video production, and scripting for task automation.
• Methodologies and tools available to organizations, departments, or teams for compiling extensive documentation about their specific workflow and procedures.

Sparktivity’s training programs are designed for creative professionals looking to extend existing knowledge, refresh dormant skills, or get up to speed with a pre-existing team.

Sparktivity is the path to a new pinnacle of creative know-how.

Uptime doesn’t just mean having a server available or access to an Internet connection, it means increasing the number of hours spent every day creating work for your clients across the entire creative professional organization.

Sparktivity knows how to standardize your workstations to increase productivity and optimize troubleshooting, how to protect your network services against time wasting outages, and how to preempt disaster recovery by safeguarding your work-product in advance.

We can maximize your team’s uptime, and thus increase their billable hours, with key strategies including:

• Cutting-edge mass deployment techniques which allow for an automated, identical setup process for all workstations, and the ability to easily issue incremental software and configuration updates, all managed from a central location on the network.
• Advanced tactics for minimizing time spent on workstation troubleshooting, from custom utilities built to handle your team’s frequent roadblocks, to spare pre-cloned workstations in ready reserve for turnarounds in under 30-minutes.
• The construction of a high-capacity gigabit LAN, fully utilized by all workstations and servers, cutting real data transfer times for large creative files in half compared to copy times on older 10 Mbps and 100 Mbps networks.
• Full redundancy for critical network services like Internet access, login servers, shared storage, web hosting, and even email.
• Automated regular backups of all team work-product, including network shares, server configurations, and workstation boot-drives.
• A comprehensive failure recovery strategy, including monthly removal and archiving of completed projects, weekly rotation delivery of backup media, and secure off-site data archives.

Sparktivity can quickly implement these solutions for your fast-moving, creative, professional organization, significantly boosting productivity and profitability.

As creative work passes through the cycle from initiation to completion, it grows with your team’s ideas, their efforts, and their feedback. As a job winds its way through many stages of development, its goals, specifications, limits, or timeframes can all change, leaving a long paper trail behind the project.

Sparktivity can help your team create an efficient workflow which will streamline daily tasks and significantly reduce stress in a deadline driven environment.

Our workflow optimization strategy for creative teams includes:

• Working with all members of the team to arrive at a single understanding of the group’s existing workflow, a roadmap which we call “The Life Of A Job”.
• Creating a paper-reductive, custom job ticketing system using PDF files which are stored with the job during production and are “frozen” with completed project files when a job is archived.
• Using job tickets to store valuable project metadata like authorship, timeline of client requests, roster of team roles, and project completion details.
• Building specialized checklists and worksheets, designed to accompany the job ticket through the cycle toward completion.
• Centralizing important shared resources (like font management and asset storage) at the server level in order to optimize version control, monitor usage legality, and maintain output reliability.
• Utilizing specialized asset cataloging software to augment the workflow as needed.
• Enhancing the public image of the creative team and its clients by establishing standardized procedures for reliable job output.

Sparktivity can improve record-keeping, timeliness, and accountability on creative deliverables by developing an optimized workflow for your creative professional organization.

Well-known in US professional quilting circles for her award-winning designs and superior craftsmanship, in October 2006 Patsy Thompson decided to take the leap from course instructor to content-creator. The launch of Patsy Thompson Design Ltd.’s online presence included an in-depth blog for quilting enthusiasts, free sample patterns for download, and extensive image galleries. The site also allowed visitors to purchase the company’s instructional DVDs which star Ms. Thompson demonstrating her techniques and advice.

By May of 2007, after a six-month rush of both retail and wholesale sales, it became clear that demand for the instructional DVDs was outstripping the flexibility of the existing lightweight eCommerce solution. Patsy Thompson Designs, Ltd. turned to Sparktivity for assistance with building a more flexible eCommerce platform which would allow all the security, convenience, and ease-of-use of a modern web store. With the new eCommerce platform successfully in place, Patsy Thompson Designs, Ltd. can invest less administrative time on the complexities of fulfillment, and put more focus on developing further creative offerings for their customers!