Social Connections 10 was our biggest North American event, and our third largest ever!

I am high in the sky over Atlantic heading back to Europe so I have had several hours to think about a recap of our last event in Toronto. Wow, it was a blast again!

After many weeks of hectic preparations, the two conference days ran as racing horses. Now there is a time to recover, take some breath and shout “Oh my, we did it again!”

First of all, we had a fabulous event with more then 200 attendees, 18 sponsors, 64 sessions, and 70 speakers.

Thank you all so much for coming!

We had all the ingredients that make a good event – a great venue (perhaps the best ever) with a VIEW of the nice city of Toronto, awesome speakers, exciting agenda, some great announcements and especially you – the attendees. All together, it created an atmosphere – as some say – “that no other user group has”.

Let me highlight just few items:

• There was exclusive content delivered by IBM product managers and execs such as Luis Benitez, Baan Slavens, Rob Ingram and Chris Crummey.
• We had multiple great case studies from big, well-known customers such as Lowes, TD Bank and RBC
• Well-known analysts Dion Hinchcliffe and Alan Lepofsky shared their insights
• We saw Project Toscana code running live for the first time!
• We have seen what’s new and coming in IBM Connections
• We practiced Design Thinking once again
• Our sponsors announced new products and enhancements (such as ConnectionsExpert from panagenda, our spotlight sponsor)
• We had a new mobile app which received a very warm welcome
• There was a masterclass on Connections adoption from Luis Suarez
• There was a closing “Ask IBM” session moderated by Ed Brill
• Over 100 people watched our live stream the first day
• And last but not least we had great fun, including a gala event in the Hockey Hall of Fame (where all our attendees could touch the famous Stanley Cup!)

At the moment, we are collecting presentations from our speakers and will publish them on SlideShare over the next week or so. All “official” photos have been already uploaded to Flickr and we hope that some people find a new profile image there 🙂 If you have your own photos or videos that you want to share, then just let us know.

We announced that the next event will take place in Southern Europe late this year, with more details coming in August.

I hope that everybody enjoyed the event as much as the Social Connections team did! Thank you all again for coming, and special thanks to IBM Canada and to our sponsors, as without them we could not run these events.

Enjoy the summer and see you all at Social Connections 11!

Jan, Bill, Christoph, Doug, Femke, Lars, Maria, Martin, Simon and Wannes

 

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