Mat's IT experience began at Christmas 1984, when his parents bought him his first computer, an Amstrad CPC 464.

Mainly due to living in a remote location - which experiences an average 3 meters (yes 3000mm or ~ 10 feet) of rainfall - Mat had plenty of opportunity to practice using his new machine. Thanks to Australian Personal Computer magazine (which at that time regularly published code samples) Mat quickly moved from playing the few games which had come with his computer, to coding his own using the variant of BASIC provided by Locomotive Software.

Mat's first exposure to formalised IT education came in his later years of high school, where "Information Technology" was offered to students as an optional elective subject. At the time, computers were not part of the main-stream educational curriculum. These classes introduced networked computers, and a new language to play with: PASCAL.

Mat did very well in the "Information Technology" class, attaining a score of 6 out of 5 (yes, 6/5 or 120%) on his final year major project, a result which helped him achieve his School's academic prize for Information Technology.

Mat's first position after Matriculation was with the Australian Department of Defence, where he was exposed for the first time to Main-Frame computing, large scale relational databases and the UNIX environment.

Following DoD, Mat worked in Financial Services, where his experience with databases and application development enabled him to begin "computerising" the client and contact information held by his employer into what could loosely be called a "Customer Relationship Management" application.

Moving to a construction firm in 1992, Mat was employed as the "office manager", a role which turned out to mean "general dogs-body". Ostensibly, Mat was employed to run the office, manage staff and look after the company's new IT infrastructure (IBM PS2 machines, Zenith Mastersport Laptops and LANTASTIC), in reality he handled these roles, in addition to becoming one of the sales staff and filling in on the construction sites when a contractor didn't turn up for work.

It was this period where Mat learned his love of power tools, building and carpentry. It was also the first time he was exposed to his favourite piece of Software.

One of his IT conundrums at the time revolved around distributing house plans from servers, to sales people, and back again. Sales staff carried a copy of AutoCAD files with them on their laptop computers so that the plans could be shown to prospective clients, modified as required, and then returned to the office for the engineering and manufacturing staff to turn into reality. The problems normally arose when a laptop, disk or server based file didn't match the copy the client had "signed-off" on.

While attending an IT conference in Melbourne, Australia, Mat saw a demonstration of a server-client based application that solved all of his file management issues. A database application that included the ability to "synchronise" and "version" database records, without having to rely on the users to transfer files to make sure information was kept up to date.

Hello - Lotus Notes!

After obtaining an "evaluation" copy of the software, developing an application and demonstrating the system as a proof of concept to the company, the hurdle became the cost of the software and the project was dropped, but the experience demonstrated to Mat the potential for what Lotus Notes could do.

Following his return to his Tasmania, Mat was employed by a major whitegoods manufacturer as the Hobart office "Trainee Manager". His responsibilities were similar to his previous position, including maintaining IT systems. Being a regional office of a major Australian company communication with head office was via a "WAN" (dial-up modem for remote data transfer back to the main server) primarily for the purpose of exchanging database records (CLARION).

In 1995, the decision to close the Hobart branch lead Mat to consider his future, which resulted in him starting his own IT consulting and training company. Over the next four years, Mat was engaged by clients with a diverse range of applications, where the client often required staff trained to a high degree of competency. Many clients also had a need to "change" the way the software worked to maximize their employees productivity. Mat often spent many hours of his own time learning applications back-to-front (and often sideways), memorizing the location of the most obscure options and check-boxes, to ensure that he was able to answer any question which may have been asked by a participant of his training classes (Mat's a Virgo - what else would you expect!).

Wordperfect reveal codes, Microsoft Word, Excel and Access Basic (later to become "Visual Basic"), Fox-Pro and a NEW language (HTML) all became second nature to him. Along with a reintroduction to that "other" application - Lotus Notes. This was also the period where Mat began using Desktop Publishing applications, such as Corel Draw, Paint-Shop-Pro, Adobe PhotoShop, Illustrator and PageMaker (later to become InDesign) and wysiwyg HTML editors and tools such as Adobe GoLive, Macromedia Dreamweaver and Flash, tools which are not in use by the average end-user, but are still great fun to use and teach!

Many of the clients Mat started working with had moved to Lotus Notes from CC Mail, Office Vision and diverse range of PC based email applications (such as Eudora and Microsoft Mail post offices). Since Mat had originally seen Lotus Notes as a Database application, working with Lotus Notes primarily as an Email system was a "different" concept. What Mat was able to bring to his clients at that stage was an "alternate" view of Lotus Notes - that "Lotus Notes is a Database Application" - a viewpoint that he has presented ever since.

In 1998 Mat joined forces with a boutique organisation - ISW - which was one of only 4 "Premier Lotus Partner(s)" in Australia. Primarily employed as an Instructor and Consultant, Mat was introduced to the Lotus Professional Certification program with this new association, and quickly organised to sit the exams to qualify as a Certified Lotus Professional. Mat completed the exams in one day, attaining Principal Certified Application Developer and Systems Administrator (Lotus Notes 4) qualifications with near perfect results. Shortly thereafter Mat completed the requirements to attain his Certified Lotus Instructor status in both Application Development and Systems Administration, qualifications that he has maintained with each new release since then.

ISW not only introduced Mat to the Lotus Professional Certification program, but also to new technologies such as DB2, as well as the AIX and AS400 operating systems and environments.

Not forgetting the "other" major software vendor, Mat maintains his skills and knowledge with Windows, SQL, Exchange, IIS, SharePoint, Project and Communications servers (Not to mention Office, Project, Visio and NT/95/98/Millennium/2000/XP/Vista) with (almost) the same fervour that he applies to the IBM/Lotus brand.

More recently Mat is again an independent contractor with clients across Australia and around the world, from Singapore to the UK and the US.

While not claiming to be a guru in EVERY aspect of computing (notes.net, msdn and google really are wonderful resources), with almost 25 years of computing experience, Mat has just about seen (and done) it all with regards to Information Technology.

Mat's personal career highlights include his involvement with The Harrison Test literacy assessment system, the Tasmanian Tigers (Cricket - sorry can't show you that one - it's a secret) player communication and management system (implemented in their Pura Cup winning season!), serving as a searchdomino.com expert and teaching literally thousands of people from all over the globe how to make "the best use of the Information Technology at their disposal" (thanks Dilbert!).

Now you know a little more about who I am.

Who are you?

Who said you have to work alone?

How can I help?

&nsbp