imason Honoured as 2008 Microsoft Partner of the Year for Custom Development Solutions, Application Infrastructure Development

Toronto, Ontario, Canada — July 16, 2008 — Today, imason proudly announced it has won the 2008 Microsoft Partner of the Year award for Custom Development Solutions, Application Infrastructure Development. The company was chosen out of an international field of top Microsoft partners as delivering market-leading customer solutions built on Microsoft technology.

“We are greatly honoured to receive the prestigious 2008 Microsoft Partner of the Year award,” said Scott Howlett, Principal and co-founder at imason.   “We remain committed to continuously building upon our deep technology knowledge base and to providing our customers with the best possible experience.”

Awards were presented in a number of categories, with winners chosen from a pool of more than 2,000 entrants worldwide. imason was recognized for superior technology and innovation in Custom Development Solutions, Application Infrastructure Development. The Custom Development Solutions, Application Infrastructure Development Partner of the Year award recognizes exceptional, innovative partners that focus on the development of customized solutions, Web solutions, and tools built on Microsoft technologies leveraging the Microsoft Visual Studio family of development tools. Specifically, custom development partners may deliver highly customized solutions to support unique customer business practices, deliver one-off enhancements that allow customers to integrate existing systems with new technologies, or develop extensions to existing Microsoft solutions that the customer may already employ. This award recognizes partners that are serving unique customer needs by developing on and with Microsoft technologies and solutions in the area of application infrastructure development.

“By helping one of Canada’s leading providers of Internet recruitment to scale their site with the Microsoft .NET Framework-based platform, imason enabled Workopolis to get to market faster and help provide its customers a better user experience,” says Lora Gernon, Senior Director, Partner Group, Microsoft Canada.

Workopolis is Canada’s leading online job site, where millions of Canadian job seekers and employers can connect by searching or posting jobs by region, career focus, industry and by job title.

“imason’s strength in combining business acumen with leading-edge technology expertise was key in accelerating our business objectives,” said Patrick Sullivan, President, Workopolis.

Founded in 1999, imason is a privately held technology consulting firm with Microsoft Gold Partner Status. imason’s solution offerings feature their “QuickStart” program, designed to help clients achieve dramatic impacts and realize greater returns on their technology investments in a shorter period of time. imason has been a part of Microsoft’s Partner Program for the past 8 years and attained the Gold level of certification.

The Microsoft Partner Program Awards recognize Microsoft partners that have developed and delivered exceptional Microsoft-based solutions during the last year. For more information about the Microsoft Partner Awards Program please visit PressPass (www.microsoft.com/presspass/ ).

About imason:  imason is a technology consulting firm that architects and develops leading-edge web solutions for enterprise customers. Targeted at employee or customer audiences, imason solutions utilize the latest technologies from Microsoft and drive lasting business value.  For more information, please visit www.imason.com.

About Workopolis:

Workopolis is Canada's leading online career-solutions provider with over 3.3 million unique visitors monthly in Canada, the most posted resumes and twice as many job postings as the nearest competitor.

Workopolis provides a fully bilingual suite of industry-leading products and services including:

• Powerful Resume Database search functions and intuitive screening tools to help connect employers with the “best fit” candidates – contributing to a 71% hiring success rate for customers.
• An inside look at niche industries with access to over 100 professional and trade associations.
• Career alerts, resume rescue and online salary calculator to help job seekers find the right job.

Headquartered in Toronto, Workopolis has offices in 8 Canadian cities. Workopolis is a partnership of Toronto Star Newspapers Ltd. and Gesca Ltd., the newspaper publishing subsidiary of Power Corporation of Canada.

Workopolis is the exclusive Official Supplier of Online Recruitment Services for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.

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