Friday July 28th is System Administrator Appreciation Day. In honor of our fellow left-brain professionals, we’ve put together a couple tips that may be helpful to those of us tasked with the challenging job of keeping creative teams stable, happy and productive.

First up: A Mac Maintenance Checklist. This is something we’ve been playing with at Creativetechs — for our clients who’ve scheduled a regular monthly maintenance visit to keep their computers fit and healthy.

Mac Maintenance Checklist (PDF)

The checklist is a simple, low-tech way for clients to make sure their computer issues get addressed. Plus it helps the tech avoid missing sporadic maintenance details.

When you need to capture an image of a long website design, don’t spend your billable hours stiching together multiple screenshots.

Mac-based designers should download a free copy of Paparazzi instead.

In Paparazzi, simply enter the URL and click Capture. Your web page loads in a small preview window. You can save the resulting image in a file format of your choice.

Tip: Use Paparazzi to preview what a site will look like at different resolution. Change the Crop Size pop-up to one of the presets (640×480, 800×600, 1024×768), or enter your own dimensions. You’ll get a sense for how well the site design works with different size displays.

Microsoft’s Exchange Server has become an industry standard for providing shared calendars, shared contacts, and centralized email across an organization. An Exchange Server can be a great choice for teams that already have a solid Windows-based infrastructure in place.

But what if you run a Mac-based studio?

That’s a question we get asked a lot. Especially by the owners of medium-sized creative studios. Their teams have the same need for centralized calendars and contacts. A good solution for Mac-based creative teams has been hard to find.

At Creativetechs, we’ve recently started installing and supporting the Kerio Mail Server. This question is becoming a little easier to answer.