After an apprenticeship at Nixdorf Computer AG, Jan-Piet Mens worked for five years as a trainer at a Nixdorf education centre in Wiesbaden, Germany, teaching courses to customers and employees.

Since 1988 he has been an independent consultant. He specializes in Internet technologies, especially e-mail systems, LDAP, DNS, Web, and Lotus Notes & Domino. For the past few years he has been consulting for a large European company, where he has designed and implemented a corporate DNS infrastructure as well as world-wide e-mail, and multi-continent LDAP services.

Jan-Piet is Dutch. He was born in Colombia, and lived in Spain for 11 years before moving to France and finally to Germany.