Wouldn’t it be cool if some totally deserving person got a very cool award?

I happen to know such a person.  His name is Matthew McDermott.  He was recently awarded the Microsoft MVP for Sharepoint Portal Server. 

My, that’s refreshing!

Matt works for Catapult Systems here in Texas and we’ve used them to help us with some of our software system deployments.  We’ve had the honor to work with Matt extensively over the years with Sharepoint, and we’ve also worked with other Catapult rock stars on Microsoft Project Server, Microsoft SMS/BDD/OSD, domain migration and email migration.  We’ve knocked out some tough projects and our IT group was able to look quite the cool cat to our end users.

Working with Matt is not only satisfying on the business side (ie, he knows his stuff and has great chops for this kidn of work), but he’s a great deal of fun to work with on a personal level.  I don’t think we’ve ever had a serious conversation.  It’s one thing to work with a competent consultant (and let’s face it, there are precious few.)  But it’s quite another to be able to actually have fun.  I mean, come on – how many of you can say you’ve worked with a consultant and have seen Thumb Wars with them?  Yeah, I thought so.

If being a great consultant wasn’t enough, in his spare time, Matt does some awesome work with K9 Search, a professional canine search team that he helped found.  He’s done search operations for Katrina and other missions.

So he’s successful in his career, he does this humanitarian (or is it caninitarian?) work on the side, AND he has time to get awarded the Microsoft MVP. 

That’s so refreshing!

Unlike our APC UPS at work, which claims to be refreshing, but it was the wrong kind of refreshing.

I was so disappointed the first time I viewed the page.