Speakers

06/062018

Call for abstracts is open for SocCnx 14 in Berlin

News abstracts, berlin, connections, ibmchampions, ibmcnx, sessions, soccnx, soccnx14, Speakers by Wannes Rams

Sharpen your pens, supercharge your keyboards, tickle those brain cells and release some awesome content to present at

Social Connections 14 in Berlin on October 16 & 17.

Yes we are calling on you, faithful speakers from our previous conferences, experienced but Social Connections novices and presenting rookies. Whether you are presenting geeky technical topics, want to use case the hell out of us or you just want to tell us an interesting story… the clock is ticking, the deadline is getting one second shorter with every second that passes.

Our call for abstracts will be open until Friday July 6. Submit fast and furious and we will reward many of you with spotlight, applause and eternal gratitude.

ps.: New submission form this year (thanks to Buzzy). Submit here

23/032017

Think Pink, Connections Pink comes to Social Connections Chicago!

News agenda, Chicago, connections, ibm, ibmcnx, ics, pink, schedule, sessions, soccnx, socialconnections, speaker, Speakers by Wannes Rams

We are announcing our first session!

We are proud to present Mr. Pink Jason Gary as a speaker at Social Connections. Jason will tell us all about the future of IBM Connections which we know as Connections Pink.

Those of you who attended IBM Connect remember the excitement and vibe in his session where the room was so full we all had to stand in the back and along the walls.

We can’t wait to hear more from Jason on the latest updates regarding Pink since IBM Connect.

Jason will be speaking with Baan Slavens. Baan is Senior Offering Manager for IBM Connections. Baan focuses on understanding the collaboration market and the future direction for collaboration for IBM Connections. She is also the Offering Manager for IBM Connection Mobile and the lead for the strategic direction of all the mobile applications in IBM Collaborations.

Check out the full description of this session here.

More to come! This is only the first of many great sessions we have lined up for you. Stay tuned for more information.

Register for the conference through our website, and note that we are accepting abstracts until end of the month if you are interested in speaking.

14/022017

Social Connections 11 Chicago Venue decided. We are going to Summit West on June 1st and 2nd!

News Chicago, connections, event, ibm, ibmcnx, register, registration, soccnx, social, socialconnections, Speakers, sponsors by Wannes Rams

After a frantic couple of weeks, the searching, comparing, discussing and negotiating is over!

We have made the choice, signed the contract so it is official – It’s gonna be Summit West that will host Social Connections 11 in Chicago.

The event will take place June 1 & 2 in this amazing downtown location!

The venue we have chosen for our 11th event is for sure gonna rock. It is called Summit Chicago and is located in the heart of Chicago with plenty of hotels nearby. Those of you who joined us in Toronto will recognise the high quality, the professional staff and the fantastic location!

Want to find out more about the location – please follow this link http://www.summitchicago.com/

We are extremely excited that we can finally kick off things and start finding speakers, sponsors, event venues for our evening events.

In the meanwhile we have opened call for abstracts and registrations.

For our sponsors, the ones that make this event happen, see the sponsor page for our packages

Join us for 2 days of learning, networking and fun. We will be running tracks spread over 3 separate rooms on a variation of topics. Of course we will talk about IBM Connections, both cloud and on premise and we will provide you with the latest news on 6.0 and Connections Pink. Apart from that, we have decided to add some more content next to IBM Connections. We will be having a limited number of sessions on Watson Workspace and Analytics.

We have created a special IBM Connect rate for the first 20 people who register before the end of IBM Connect. This rate will automatically expire after IBM Connect, so make sure you register fast. $99 for this conference is not even a bargain, it’s nearly a free giveaway!!

We hope to see you all in Chicago for a great event.

The Social Connections team

(Maria, Simon, Wannes, Lars, Martin, Femke, Doug, Christoph, Jan)

26/042016

Social Connections 10 – An international line up of 70+ speakers!

News abstracts, agenda, connections, Speakers by Wannes Rams

Still undecided about attending Social Connections 10 in Toronto on Monday June 6th and Tuesday June 7th?

If you are then check out some of the great sessions by speakers from across the globe! Our agenda is now publish on our website Link and in our mobile app (where you can create you own personal schedule for the event! (Find out more about our mobile app).

Here is a selection of some the great sessions you need to come and listen to:

10+ user case studies focused on their implemention of IBM Connections!
Great sessions by IBM Champion (18 IBM champions are currently attending the event)
A peak into the future with sessions on Toscana, Future of work and What is coming to IBMConnections
Our popular ‘Spotlight track’ with 15 minute sessions
Some great sponsor sessions from IBM, panagenda, Harbour lights, TimetoAct, TrustSphere and Kudos
and more……

At finally, we have over 70 speakers at the event. These people are from all parts of the world and have some great content to share with you!

So what are you waiting for – Register now!

08/042016

Last push for abstracts – we know you have it in you!

News abstracts, Speakers by Lars Samuelsson

Hi Everyone!

Now it’s time to push those last few abstracts in. We know that you have a lot on your plates, as we all do. But we’d love to hear from you at Social Connections.

What’s your take on the future of work? How has IBM Connections (on premise or Cloud) helped you and your organisation become more social and efficient? Can the watercooler be removed now that we have a virtual one? The possibilities are endless (unlike my imagination, as you might see here).

We have extended the abstract submission deadline until Thursday the 14th of April, at 2PM CET.. That’s 8PM EST for you east coasters, and probably very very early for the rest of you.

We do have a great lineup so far, big thanks for all the submitted abstracts, but we’d like to see a few more!

Maybe you are a first time speaker? No worries! This is the perfect place to get your feet wet, trust me on that one. My first speaking engagement was at Social Connection 8, and it was a great experience for me personally. Had a lot of fun and got great feedback to help out my future speaking engagements.

So come on! Get your abstracts in! Click here!

Can’t wait to see and hear from you in Toronto!

19/092014

Social Connections VI – so how did we rate?

News sessions, soccnx, soccnx soccnxvi prague, socialconnections, Speakers, survey, wrapup by Wannes Rams

While the team is working super hard to get Social Connections VII ready to roll, it is time to take a last look back at the previous event.

Social Connections VI in Prague was a great conference, many have written about it already, but it is time for some facts based on the feedback we received through the surveys.

As a starter I want to thank all of you that took the time to fill out the survey, your feedback is very important for us as we try to improve the conference at every occurrence to provide an even better experience.

One of the most important statistics for us as organisers is if you would recommend this conference to someone else and if you want to return to the next one.

A whopping 91% would consider attending the next conference, 100% would recommend to someone else. That is just fantastic.

Here are the most interesting results on the conference organisation in general.

85% found the venue (Hotel Ambassador) good to excellent
We hit a sweet spot on our online registration system with a 98% satisfaction rate
Agenda and location information received 98% as well
And the overall organisation received 93%

Some of the comments left in the surveys turn out to be very useful. Here are some of the enhancements we are considering or implementing based on your feedback:

We intend to print a map of the venue to include in the welcome pack as we had some comments on rooms that were difficult to find.
We are revamping the website as we write this.
We are discussing the possibility to have some longer sessions for some of the deep technical content.

So what about the feedback on the sessions and the speakers? I agree that food is important, and I like a 10 Gb wifi connection but in the end we want great content and ditto speakers (session links go to their recordings on Vimeo):

Our opening session scored a 92% satisfaction rate which is pretty impressive.

In the main venue, the top sessions were:

For the Administration track, our top performers received scores of

The Case/Sponsor track had the following top ratings:

And last but not least on the Development track:

We’re truly thrilled by these excellent ratings, and they’re much deserved by our exceptional speakers that travel such distances and give us so much time to attend the events.

As ever, the team will be trying hard to do even better at the Stockholm event. The agenda is shaping up incredibly well, and will be published next week.

In the meantime, if you want to take in some exceptional Social Business content, you know where to come!

21/082014

Social Connections VII: Looking for speakers, submit your abstracts now!!

News abstracts, sessions, soccnx, Speakers, stockholm by Wannes Rams

Do you want to speak at the number one European (and soon US) social conference? I know I want to, let me give you some reasons to submit an abstract…

We have 5 different tracks to make sure everyone can find sessions that fit their interest.
- We are looking for some high technical sessions in our Development and Infrastructure tracks to make sure all geeks (like me) get their subscribed dose.
- In our Case study track we are looking for some real world stories that show the true value of the products
- We are also looking for sessions that can convince CIOs, CEOs, … to actually invest in the products we all love in our Management track
- And last but not least, we would like some of our sponsors to showcase the real value of their products in the Sponsors track
I have been told Stockholm is an amazing city. So if you are tired of the hot weather in the region you live in, join us to experience some real wintertimes! 🙂 You can find an introduction to Stockholm here.
It is a great conference to speak at and of course you can watch all the other great sessions. I have spoken at two Social Connections in the past and it was a great experience.
Join the exclusive VIP reception on Friday evening

So are you up for it yet? Of course we are looking for some experienced speakers, but we are also looking for some hidden gems. People that have an interesting story to tell, but might not realise this yet themselves. so if you haven’t spoken at a conference yet, but you feel like this is your moment, go for it. All sessions will be 30 minutes, so you only really need 20 or so slides, plus a story to tell!

To get an idea of sessions at our past conference, have a look at the Prague agenda and the recorded sessions.

We are expecting your abstracts before 31/8 via this link. We can’t wait to hear from you!

03/042013

Curious about the Social Connections V sessions line-up? Here’s a sneak peek!

News soccnx, SoccnxV, Speakers, zurich by Wannes Rams

After announcing Heidi Ambler and Michael Sampson as our fantastic Keynote speakers for the IBM Connections user group event in Zurich on June 28th it’s time to lift just a little bit more of the covers of what you can expect this June. As abstract submission is still open we can’t disclose the full program yet but as the number of great sessions that have been entered is so big already we decided to give you a little sneak peek of some of them to wet your appetite

First of all, in the Business track we’ll have a session by Tim Clark from Collaboration Matters who’ll be discussing how to project manage an IBM Connections implementation by using examples from a real life implementation project

Project Managing a Connections Install

Deploying Connections is easy. 10 days of I.T. effort and then tell the users the url. Right?
Well, No. You are so far away from the truth it might actually be funny.
Let Tim take you through the Project Management (PM) of a Connections project from start to finish and show you all the gory stuff in the middle too.
He’ll explain why you need to PM a Connections project and suggest best practise stages for you too.
Experiences from real world PM from real world Connections install projects..

But if project management isn’t your thing then the development stream might be an option. Mikkel Heisterberg of Intravison will tell you all about the Activity stream and how to develop for it.

Developing for the Activity Stream

The future of business is social and the activity stream is the way events and messages are communicated in the social business. In this session you’ll learn all there is to know about the activity stream including exactly what it is and how to interact with it using your favorite development environment whether that be JavaScript, XPages, Java or even the plain vanilla HTTP based REST API. This session is for you if you want to start working the Activity Stream.

And if Administration is what makes you tick then check out the great sessions by Victor Toal from ToalSystems on managing your Connections install:

IBM Connections: So you have it installed – now what?

You have successfully installed IBM Connections in your environment – but now what comes next? Installation is one thing, but keeping your new environment up and running requires a different focus:
What are some of the regular actions you should be doing to proactively keep your environment running?
Where do you start looking when something looks wrong?
How do you fulfill some of the requests users now come to you with?
How do you correctly change configurations without breaking what you just built?
These questions and more are what we will explore during our conversation about IBM Connections.

Or the session by Gabriella Davis from Turtle Partnership on how to identify and solve problems once they arise.

Tools of the Problem Solver

In even the best built, most redundant and intensively supported environments – sometimes things go wrong. In this session we’ll look at how the IBM Connections administrator can work to diagnose problems through logs, database performance, maintenance and auto started services. We’ll also review how to gather the information IBM support will need to help you

As said, only a little sneak peek… more great sessions are yet to come when the full program will be announced in the first week of May!

So mark your calendar for June 28th in Zurich this summer and sign up. Don’t wait too long, seats are limited and going fast. This is one event you don’t want to miss!