What's it all about?

Recognition. Reward. Support. Admiration.

With the Ignite IT Awards, the MSDN Code Awards and the TechNet Innovation Awards come together for the first time. Why? To recognize and reward the efforts of Canadian IT Professionals and Software Developers with two grand prizes including Crystal trophies, Software Kits valued at $1,000 and $5,000 prizes.

New this year is a focus on a video segment in addition to your written submission. Take up to 60 seconds to support your story and entice your peers to learn more about it. Don’t have video capabilities? Simply upload a photo and briefly describe what you’ve achieved.


Who is EligibleWhat's the timeline


As long as you’ve got a great story to tell and you’re part of the IT community, we want to hear from you!

Whatever your story is, whatever experience level you’re at, and whatever technology you used-provided the solution is partly Microsoft - based - share it with your peers by submitting your story. You can also encourage someone else to share their own story or submit on their behalf - it’s all about recognizing the community.

Bookmark this page for frequent visits and see what new stories are posted-you can comment on your peers’ latest submissions. Throughout March, you can vote for the top 5 Developer submissions and the top 5 IT Professional submissions. Our judges will then select the winners from those finalists.

IMPORTANT: This year, ONE MSDN Code award and ONE TechNet Innovation award will be given out-individuals and teams are vying for the same award.







Tips and Tricks

Now that the voting phase has begun, make sure your story gets the attention it deserves! Hit the ground running by using the strategies below to promote your stories.

Our expert panel of judges will pick the winners from the 5 IT Pros and 5 Developers with the most votes, so don’t stop promoting until voting closes March 31, 2009!


Awards & Prizes

Prizes will be awarded in May 2009. Winning submissions will be displayed here through
next year’s awards, as well as on the TechNet and MSDN sites and the TechNet Flash newsletter
and the MSDN Flash newsletter. Plus, winners may be asked to speak as special guests at various Microsoft events throughout the year.


WINNERS RECEIVE:


Developer or
Developer Team of the Year

  • Prize of $5,000
  • MSDN Code Awards Crystal Trophy

IT Professional or IT Professional Team of the Year

  • Prize of $5,000
  • TechNet Innovation Awards Crystal Trophy

The top 5 Developers and top 5 IT Professionals receive:

  • A Microsoft Software Kit including a full edition of Visual Studio Pro - an approximate value of $1,000

Last year's winners and finalists

Last year, the MSDN Code Awards and TechNet Innovation Awards saw some incredible submissions and heard some amazing success stories. Chief among these were Alexei Kouznetsov MSDN Code Awards Developer of the Year and Apption, Development Team of the Year winner. On the IT Professional side, Kurtis Kril and Navantis produced outstanding work of their own, earning them the TechNet Innovation Awards IT Professional of the Year and IT Professional Team of the Year, respectively.

Check out their submissions to see how you can make the most impact with your own entries next year!


MSDN Code Awards
Individual Developer of the Year:
Alexei Kouznetsov
Learn more



MSDN Code Awards
Developer Team of the Year:
Apption
Learn more
TechNet Innovation IT
Professional of the Year:
Kurtis Kril (Client/Company: Telus)
Learn more



Navantis
Learn more





Alexei Kouznetsov

MSDN Code Awards Individual Developer of the Year:

TOP

Working within a University of Calgary research group, Alexei used SQL Server 2005, Visual C# 2005, .NET 2.0 and .NET 3.0, and user-friendly GUI to develop a novel analytical software tool to help with the diagnosis and prognosis of cancer from histiology specimens. The tool has potential benefits to the community as it helps provide an objective, reproducible, and automated measure of tumor malignancy, and can thereby help guide the choice of better cancer treatment strategies.

Apption

MSDN Code Awards Developer Team of the Year:

TOP

Leveraging core expertise in SOA, Apption—Mike Kelland, Pascale Morin, Tariq Zaid, Zee Yang, Scott Sherin, Ramsay Eltaher, and Sandy Ahluwalia—developed a new service-oriented architecture to replace the Canadian Human Rights Commission’s Case Management System.

Using Windows Workflow and Communications Foundations from the .NET Framework, Apption created the first production-scale solution development using .NET 3.0 for the Government of Canada.

Kurtis Kril (Client/Company: Telus)

TechNet Innovation IT Professional of the Year:

TOP

Kurtis replaced the existing Web Single Signon application that was a challenge to manage and support with an Active Directory Federation Services-based solution. The implementation and ongoing support and maintenance costs are lower than the existing solution and it allows the company the flexibility to roll out any new web applications leveraging the new implementation.

Navantis
TOP

Yong Hu - with Wenguo Wu, Stanley Jiang, Carlos Rochetti, and David Barnes - developed and implemented the Ontario Critical Care Information System that helped transform critical care service delivery in Ontario. It connects 120 hospitals with each other using BizTalk 2006 to coordinate data flow and Active Directory Federation Services for single sign on capabilities.

Share your IT story

Download submission form

The Judges

The MSDN Code Awards and the TechNet Innovation Awards have always been proud of all our great judges, but with the Ignite IT Awards, we feel we’ve really outdone ourselves. Along with a long-time DevTeach speaker, a two-time Microsoft Most Valuable Professional winner, and Canada’s first MVP for SQL Server, our judging panel includes Alexei Kouznetsov, last year’s Developer of the Year and and Kurtis Kril, last year’s IT Professional of the Year.

Learn more about our judges now.


Alexei Kouznetso Alexei Kouznetsov
MSDN Code Awards 2008 Individual Winner
Watch video
Kurtis Kril Kurtis Kril
TechNet Innovation Awards 2008 Individual Winner
Watch video
 
Daniel Nerenberg Daniel Nerenberg
IT Pro Industry Expert
Watch video
Dr.Tom Moreau Dr.Tom Moreau
IT Pro Industry Expert
Watch video
 
Etienne Tremblay Etienne Tremblay
Developer Industry Expert
Watch video
Stephen Ibaraki Stephen Ibaraki
Industry Expert & Former CIPS Chairman and President
Watch video
 
Miguel Carrasco Miguel Carrasco
Developer Industry Expert
Learn more



Alexei Kouznetsov
Alexei Kouznetsov

MSDN Code Awards 2008 Individual Winner

TOP

My hometown of St. Petersburg is one of the most remarkable places on Earth. I grew up there and graduated from a school that specializes in Physics and Mathematics. After school, I went on to attend The St. Petersburg State Polytechnic University and earned a Master of Science Degree in Nuclear Physics. Luckily, my major professional interest areas include both Physics and Computer Science. Completing several projects in radiation oncology, I received the Silver St. Panteleimon Statue as first prize at the Plenum of the Russian Medical Society of Oncologists in 1999. Working within a Tom Baker Cancer Centre research group, I was also selected as the Individual Winner of the 2008 MSDN Code Awards.

Daniel Nerenberg
Daniel Nerenberg

IT Pro Industry Expert

TOP

Daniel Nerenberg is an MCT, MCSE, MCITP, and an independent consultant based in Montreal. He is also the President of the Montreal IT Pro user group (www.mitpro.ca). Daniel is passionate about technology and the amazing problems that can be solved with its application. Driven by the desire to see cool technology bring people together in global and local communities, he loves helping people to maximize their use of technology. Daniel has had the honour of receiving the Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional award for 2007 and 2008.

Daniel has written and consulted on the topics of Windows Deployment, Application virtualization, and Windows infrastructure. Daniel also writes regular updates for "The Lazy Admin" Tech guidance website. (www.thelazyadmin.com)

Etienne Tremblay
Etienne Tremblay
TOP

Etienne Tremblay is a lead technologist at EDS Canada with more than 17 years of experience in enterprise application development. His primary focus has been the manufacturing and mining industries and lately configuration management and development tooling. Throughout those years he has become a subject matter expert in software development lifecycle tooling and has architected the corporately managed Team System solution at EDS. He has also travelled around the world to train .NET developers. He’s been a speaker at DevTeach since 2005 and has delivered MSDN webcasts a few times. He represents EDS on the Microsoft Customer Advisory Council for Team System.

Miguel Carrasco
Miguel Carrasco
TOP

Miguel Carrasco is the Software Development Manager at Anvil Digital, a software development and marketing company in Winnipeg, Manitoba. With over 10 years experience in the IT industry, Miguel has been involved in over 100 real-world projects ranging from software development, team leadership and organization, creative user experience design, and infrastructure projects.

Miguel enjoys sharing his knowledge, and most of all, developing software with other people. An enthusiastic speaker, Miguel loves being in front of a crowd and creating excitement about the tools, technology, and best practices to building amazing applications.

Kurtis Kril
Kurtis Kril
TOP

Kurtis is a high energy and consummate consulting professional of 15 years with vast consulting experience in information technology. He has built a solid reputation from the design, delivery and support of a full range of network solutions. Kurtis has achieved 4 different Vendor certifications. Roles range from project manager, network architect, migration specialist, messaging architect, network analyst, and network administrator with a main focus on Active Directory, Microsoft Windows (all versions), Exchange (all versions), ADFS, PKI infrastructures, Microsoft Clusters, ISA 2006/2004/2000 Enterprise, IIS Office Communications Server 2007, and IBM/Lotus Domino.

Dr.Tom Moreau
Dr.Tom Moreau
TOP

Dr. Tom Moreau has been enjoying SQL Server for over 15 years. He specializes in database design and development, performance and tuning of the relational engine, as well as high availability solutions. Tom has authored over 100 articles on SQL Server, as well as co-authoring a book on SQL Server 2000. He is also very active in the SQL Server community, particularly the SQL Server public newsgroups. Tom is Canada’s first SQL Server MVP, awarded from 2001 to present. He has presented at SQL Connections (1999 and 2000), SQL Teach (2001), the Microsoft Customer and Partner Experience Summit (2006), the Toronto SQL Server Users Group (2007), and Tech•Days (2008).

Stephen Ibaraki
Stephen Ibaraki
TOP

Since 1965, founding CIPS Fellow Stephen Ibaraki’s has been recognized with more than 40 international accolades including 7 lifetime achievement awards, as profiled here >. In the past, Ibaraki was a multiple award-winning tenured educator; a computing-head in business and technology; and a multi-company founder/entrepreneur with a long history in software development and infrastructure innovation. He is the first Chairman of the Global Board of Culminis, and the past Chairman and President of CIPS. Check out his Microsoft profile from the Strategic Architecture Forum (SAF) keynote it received a 97.5% recommendation rating!

Thank you. Your vote has been cast.

Thanks again for taking the time to vote for your favourite Ignite IT Awards submission. If you opted into the draw, your name has been entered into the draw to win one of 10 4GB Microsoft Zunes. Voting doesn’t end until March 31, 2009, so bookmark the page and come back tomorrow to vote again—and for another chance to win. You can vote for as many submissions as you like—or you can just click “Vote for all my favourites”—but you can’t vote for the same submission twice in one day.

The winners of the Ignite IT Awards for best IT Professional and Developer stories will be announced in May and will be featured in the MSDN Flash and TechNet Flash technical newsletters. Not a member? Subscribe to the MSDN Flash newsletter or TechNet Flash newsletter now.

Thank you for taking the time to vote for the outstanding contributions your peers made to Canada’s IT community.

Sincerely,

Mark Relph

This year’s winners

Thank you Canada! With the inaugural Ignite IT Awards, we saw some really intriguing and innovative stories from some of the best and brightest minds in Canada’s IT community. It’s been an honour to showcase them here, and we couldn’t have done it without your help.

Recognizing the top Developer and IT Professional from the ten finalists—as chosen by you and your peers—has been tough, but our judges have come to their final decision. The 2009 winner of the Ignite IT Award for IT Professionals is The Community Caregiver Portal Solution by Navantis—Social Networking in Action and 2009 winner of the Ignite IT Award for Developers is AgilePlanner for Digital Tabletop: A Tabletop Based Project Planning Tool for Distributed Teams by University of Calgary.

Check out their submissions below to get inspired and see how you can make the most impact with your own entries next year!


2009 winner of the Ignite IT Award for IT Professionals:
The Community Caregiver Portal Solution by Navantis—Social Networking in Action

Check out the full submission now
2009 winner of the Ignite IT Award for Developers:
AgilePlanner for Digital Tabletop: A Tabletop Based Project Planning Tool for Distributed Teams
Check out the full submission now

2009 winner of the Ignite IT Award for IT Professionals

The Community Caregiver Portal Solution by Navantis—Social Networking in Action
TOP

Today, over 3 million Canadians deal with the myriad challenges of being the main source of constant care for a family member or loved one with a chronic disease or an acute condition. From finding services and resources to finding people under similar circumstances, VON understood the difficulties caregivers face and selected Navantis to build an online solution that would alleviate these issues. Using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Navantis impressively created a bilingual, integrated health services, web-based portal for the Canadian caregiver community. Collaborative, user-friendly, and highly customizable, the social networking platform provides caregivers with a support hub, valuable resources, and direct communication with doctors, nurses and patients.

Check out the full submission now

2009 winner of the Ignite IT Award for Developers

AgilePlanner for Digital Tabletop: A Tabletop Based Project Planning Tool for Distributed Teams
TOP

To help overcome the difficulties inherent in planning meetings for agile teams, We Are Agile used Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, XAML and Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation and a digital tabletop to create AgilePlanner for Digital Tabletop (APDT). With its large, horizontal touch sensitive device and adaptability to multiple platforms, APDT helps connect remote developers to a specially separated environment through multimodal interaction, including: finger touch or mouse events; gesture recognition; handwriting recognition; and voice-command recognition. Shown at the 2008 Agile Software Developer Conference, APDT received very positive reviews and feedback.

Check out the full submission now

Microsoft Microsoft
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Welcome to the Submission Browser

OUR JUDGES HAVE MADE THEIR DECISION

Congratulations to Navantis Inc. for being selected as the 2009 Winner of the Ignite IT Award for IT Professionals and to Xin Wang, Frank Maurer and Sebastian Weber for being selected as the 2009 Winners of the Ignite Award for Developers.

Thanks to everyone who entered. We saw some truly great work.

Have a look below at the submissions from the 5 Developers and 5 IT Professionals finalists as chosen by the Canadian IT community.

Want to make sure you don’t miss next year’s Ignite IT Awards? Subscribe to the MSDN Flash or TechNet Flash technical newsletters.


Awards
THE TOP 5 IT PROFESSIONAL SUBMISSIONS
The Community Caregiver Portal Solution by Navantis—Social Networking in Action
IT PRO K-12 Network Overhaul
View entry
IT PRO Elderly(Alzheimer) mental fitness
View entry
IT PRO Welaptega Reborn
View entry
IT PRO Outcrypt: Email Encryption as an Add-In for Outlook 2003 & 2007
View entry
THE TOP 5 DEVELOPER SUBMISSIONS
AgilePlanner for Digital Tabletop: A Tabletop Based Project Planning Tool for Distributed Teams
DEV DotNetNuke Open Source Web Application Framework
View entry
DEV RPS project
View entry
DEV EDS.NET- Engineering Design System data Integration framework
View entry
DEV TirexBricks Content Management
View entry
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