Life during my first year at Microsoft has been almost exactly as I imagined it might be, but as I always do at Christmas I reflected on the year past and particularly this year on my first 9 months as a Microsoft Employee. Whilst doing so I remembered exactly what prompted me to sign up to this fun...

Within the last month, I have taken all three Microsoft Azure Certification Exams, two of them have been BETA tests. Read on and you can get you own code to take a FREE Azure BETA Exam (only 500 codes available – first come – first served) So, I post quite often about certification and...

Yesterday Microsoft announced that Azure RemoteApp would be generally available from Thursday 11th December. Anyone who reads this blog will know that I rate this service very highly indeed. The ability to run Windows applications from any platform without having to run the infrastructure on your...

Each month here in the @TechnetUk #ITPro office there is a mad scramble (bunfight / race / polite debate) to bid for the best blog topics for the month. Each quarter has a theme, this quarter it is ‘the right tools for the job’. I was lucky enough to see the email early and our editor Charlotte...

A couple of months ago I had a very interesting chat with Andy a Data Centre admin at CP Ltd about using PowerShell to manage Azure as Andy is partially sighted, and his team mate Lewis is blind (For more on this please read Andy’s post on the TechNet UK blog ) . I wanted to go into some of the...

Microsoft released the first Technical Preview of Windows 10 to much acclaim back in October. There have been three releases so far and we currently sit on the ‘last release of the Calendar year’ – Build 9879. The Technical Preview is intended primarily for the enterprise to evaluate...

Not one to miss! ... Mark Russinovich and other Azure Experts will be running an online event through the MVA in December. Do you want a sneak peek at enhancements in Windows 10? And/or do you want to get some Azure training to help you prepare for the Exam 70-533: Implementing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure...

We caught up with Mark Russinovich , Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft Azure, to find out a bit about what he talked about at IPEXPO this year plus his thoughts on cloud security and ethical hacking as well what he feels the future of the cloud will be and how the IoT will impact this. 1. Firstly...

Before I get into my next post you may have noticed that ML has changed compared with a few weeks ago -the main page previews experiments differently, and the visualization of data has also changed.. One other problem hit me and that was some of the parts of my demo experiment didn’t work...

If you are at all interested in Enterprise Mobility then Wednesday 12th November at Excel in London is the place to be. This FREE event has lots going for it. Enterprise mobility is not all that is on offer. The morning is dedicated to some big-hitting keynote speakers. Including Professor Brian Cox...

In this fourth post in my Azure Machine Learning series we are actually going to do the training itself. I have tidied up my experiment from last time to get rid of the modules to export data to SQL Azure as that has now served it’s purpose .. Before we get stuck into training there’s...

In my last post we saw how to clean, transform and join datasets. I also mentioned I had trouble doing the join at all and even now it’s not quite right so how can we look at the data and find out what’s going on. The visualisation option only shows a few rows of the 2 million in the dataset...

As IT Professionals, it is all too easy to lose sight of the impact our daily job can have on the poor, unsuspecting species known as the ‘user’. It could be said that having spent the last 20 plus years entirely working in or around the IT industry, I am both long in the tooth and set in...

In my last post we looked at how to load data into Microsoft Azure Machine Learning using the browser based ML Studio. We also started to look at the data around predicting delayed flights and identified some problems with it and this post is all about getting the data into the right shape to ensure...

Having published a post on Azure RemoteApp recently, I have been absolutely inundated with requests (well three people have asked me) for information on how to use Azure RemoteApp with an application that is not published by default and that I DON’T want to run on my own premises. So here...

In my last post I split the process of using Microsoft Azure Machine Learning (MAML) down to four steps: Import the data Refine the data Build a model Put the model into production. Now I want to go deeper into each of these steps so that you can start to explore and evaluate how...

It comes as news to nobody that the IT industry is rocketing through a massive transformation, with every Marketing Exec and his dog bouncing around phrases like ‘Cloud Computing’, ‘Big Data’ and ‘Internet of Things’ as if they’re going out of fashion. However...

The importance of ‘The Cloud’ in a world of connected devices. It doesn’t really matter if you are a consumer or an enterprise user. The number of devices you are likely to be using has increased from 0 or 1 to around 4 or 5 already. This is likely to increase as we consider the...

So imagine you are the CTO / CIO of a business (any size, it doesn’t matter from 10 people to 10,000) your clever team of developers have just implemented a top-notch line of business application (LOB) using the latest tools, on the Windows platform. The application becomes the de-facto tool for...

Back in the sixties my Dad worked in an IT department where there were about a hundred people just to operate the one ICL mainframe in that data centre. These operators had banks of lever arch files containing instructions to handle every aspect of the day to day running of this environment from changing...

Surveillance systems, campaign trackers, sales tools, supply chain monitoring, manufacturing lines, it’s hard to think of an area of a modern business isn’t churning out reams of data. This abundance of information presents companies with one of their biggest challenges, and opportunities...

There are two certification examinations that make up the MCSA Office 365. The background, requirements and details are listed here and are partially shown in the graphic below. In short, to certify you need to pass 70-346 and 70-347 (the 70 simply identifies the retail examination, there are other...

I guess it all started to come together with the public cloud and the Enterprise back in June last year when Microsoft and Oracle announced a partnership . I remember a few months later being at IPEXPO 2013 in London and introducing myself to a guy on the Oracle stand as a “friend”. He was a bit confused...

By Steve Plank – Microsoft Technical Evangelist I’d say there’s a greater than 50:50 chance you’re confused about cloud-computing unless you’re already involved. Terms like “public cloud”, “hybrid cloud”, “Infrastructure as a Service”...

By Geoff Evelyn , SharePoint MVP owner of www.sharepointgeoff.com As the use of content management systems evolve with users adding more, ahem, "content", the organizations accountable for those content systems will need to ensure that they build in people resources who can manage that content...