We’ll be back in August 2025 in Montreal, Canada for CMS Connect 25 and before that you can also join us in January in Florida for CMS Kickoff 25. See you there or earlier in the global CMS Experts community.

You can browse photos from the conference and here’s a few posts with takeaways:

• Chris Baker, Stellar Elements: “all of us who seek to create better, more accessible web experiences still have plenty of work to do”

• Janus Boye: Kajoo wins CMS Idol 24 in Montreal

  • more background from Roland Benedetti, Pantheon: “There's nothing like a 6-minute live demo. Love that exercise!“

• Joyce Peralta, McGill: Speaking to iconic industry leaders on addressing content governance challenges, improving user experience, and ensuring our digital spaces are accessible and inclusive

• Kamruz Jaman, Konabos: “Content is hard. We all face them, there is no silver bullet and only through these open conversations can we try to address and solve them.”

• Mark Garrepy, CMS Critic on the heart of content, open source, pragmatic AI, IA and more

• Roland Benedetti, Pantheon: Three questions about the state of CMS, headless and Universal CMS

On the agenda, we had recent trends under the digital experience umbrella (incl. GenAI, low-carbon digital solutions, search, Universal CMS) and several stories from the frontlines. We also explored the need for a new professional association and finally, we did our best to look around the corner at what’s coming next. An unparalleled in-person CMS conference experience that will equip you to move things forward. 

World-class speakers at CMS Connect 24

What is CMS Connect?

We started with CMS Kickoff 23, which was quite well received. We made it bigger and importantly better at CMS Kickoff 24. Now we’re building on it, taking it to Canada for a summer edition, and working on making it even better with input and participation from our global CMS Expert community.

Conferences come in many shapes and sizes. This one has a maximum of 100 participants and we sold out in June.

The sessions are without the usual sales and marketing pitches. There’s also plenty of time for conversations, so that you can bring actionable insights back to your desk and your projects.

Who joined us?

It was an international conference with confirmed participants from Europe and North America. It was a really friendly mix of vendors, agencies, analysts and customers who got together to learn, network and talk about what really matters in CMS right now.

Among the vendors who joined us were Agility, ai12z, Conscia.ai, Crownpeak, dotCMS, Drupal, Fastr, Kentico, Kinsta, Little Forest, Magnolia, Netlify, Pantheon, TechGuilds, TYPO3, Optimizely, SearchStax, Uniform, Wix and Yext. As you can see, it’s not just the usual CMS vendors, but also many others from the larger MarTech ecosystem.

On the agency and consulting side, experienced implementation folks from fine companies like 9thCO, 10up, Autogram, Contextual Code, Crowd Favorite, CTC Solutions, dotfusion, Dovecut Studio, Evolving Web, Konabos, NULogic, Octahedroid, Reason One, Stellar Elements, Toumoro and Valtech made the commitment to learning and networking.

Among the analysts attending were Mark Demeny from MACH Alliance, Matt Garrepy from CMS Critic and our host Janus Boye from Boye & Co in Denmark.

A key point is also digital leaders from the customer-side. Here you could meet seasoned practitioners from Government of Québec, McGill University, Medavie Blue Cross, SUNY Oswego, TELUS and several others.

Conference partners

Venue

The conference was held at Montréal CoWork, a place we selected for its uplifting atmosphere and environment conducive to creativity, new ideas and teamwork.

It’s located in Le Plateau-Mont-Royal, a hip part of Montreál. Surrounded by quirky shops, colorful buildings with twirling iron staircases, and third-wave coffee shops.