Mick Moignard's Blog

I'm Mick Moignard, Lotus Notes Consultant and Model Railroader.   I work for Unipart Group in the UK, in Unipart Expert Practices.   Please note that as ever, anything written on these pages is my personal opinion and not necessarily that of Unipart Group, DominoPower magazine or Zatz Publishing, and should not be construed as such.

I  grew up in Solihull, West Midlands, UK, but bow live a few miles east of Oxford, UK with wife Nikki, two adult kids (when they are here) and a somewhat manic cat.

While my first encounter with computers was the Marconi Elliott  4130 at Uni in Aberystwyth,  my first real computer work was as an IBM Mainframe programmer with Lucas Aerospace in 1974, working with PL/I (what a nice language that was) and starting to use the IMS database management system, followed by some years with a software house that sent me to Unipart.  A year then spent with Aramco in the UK and Saudi Arabia was followed by joining Unipart as an employee in 1983, still doing mainframe-based work, still PL/1 with IMS DB/DC,  and increasingly using DB2.    PCs started to appear at Unipart around 1986 - anyone remember IBM's PS/2 range? - and by 1989 I was working on an OS/2 Rexx (another nice language) and OS/2 Database Manager application.

Then I discovered Lotus Notes.  Version 2, on 15 August 1991.   I evangelised Notes within Unipart, and as they say, the rest is history: a corporate rollout of Lotus Notes in 1993 was followed in 1994 by Unipart establishing a Lotus Business Partner practice, and I've been with that ever since - it's now a part of Unipart Expert Practices.   I've worked as part of the team with customers all over the UK, Western Europe and in the US.   I'm a Notes AD 3/4/5/6 PCLP (actually the P bit only since R4), but have also done a fair bit of infrastructure consulting as well as development and development management,  

I write about Lotus Notes, too.  I'm Senior Technical Editor with DominoPower Magazine, and you can see a list of the articles I've written here.  (You get a rather old and slightly naff picture there, too).

I have another passion, too, Model Railroading, specifically the Rio Grande 3-foot gauge railroads of southwestern Colorado, USA.    That's been going longer than Lotus Notes, too. I started that interest in around 1978.  And in the last few years, I've become especially interested in the use of Digital Command Control, using equipment from Digitrax and Soundtraxx,  among others.   I write magazine articles for my hobby, too; in the UK magazine Continental Modeller in the 1990s, and more recently on DCC for Scalefour News, and have gained an NMRA MR Author Achievement Program certificate from them.