A few things happening in the world of Azure 

#AzureAD Domain Services is now GA!

Lift and shift to the cloud just got WAY easier!

In May this year, Microsoft announced several exciting new features and improvements to the service including secure LDAP support, support for configuring DNS and custom OUs
Azure AD Domain Services provides managed domain services such as domain join, group policy, LDAP, & Kerberos/NTLM authentication that are fully compatible with Windows Server Active Directory.

Setting up Azure AD Domain Services is simple. You simply toggle the service to ‘enabled’, pick a DNS domain name for your managed domain and select a virtual network where you’d like the managed domain to be available.

More info: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/enterprisemobility/2016/10/12/azuread-domain-services-is-now-ga-lift-and-shift-to-the-cloud-just-got-way-easier/

Satya Nadella is coming to Sydney

Learn more about Microsoft’s latest technologies, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and leading local experts will be at an exclusive developer-only event in Sydney.

Expert insights and analysis, live demos and stories from the front line. Xamarin cross-platform development and the functionality of cognitive services, the integration of open source DevOps practices with Azure and so much more.

The event will be on Wednesday, November 16, 2016 – 8:30 AM to 12:30 PM at the The Star Event Centre.

Satya Nadella salary was 18.2 million in 2014.

Register here https://aka.ms/devmeetup and http://www.meetup.com/Microsoft-events-in-Australia/events/234986785/

Microsoft researchers reach human parity in speech recognition

Researchers and engineers in Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence and Research division reported they have a speech recognition system that makes the same or fewer errors than professional people.  They reported a word error rate (WER) of 5.9 percent, down from the 6.3 percent reported just last month.

The 5.9 percent error rate is about equal to that of people who were asked to transcribe the same conversation and it’s the lowest ever recorded.

The milestone will have broad implications for things like Xbox and Cortana.

More Information: http://blogs.microsoft.com/next/2016/10/18/historic-achievement-microsoft-researchers-reach-human-parity-conversational-speech-recognition/

DevOps days coming to Sydney

Another event, Thursday, Dec 1, 2016 – Friday, Dec 2, 2016
DevOpsDays in Sydney
https://www.devopsdays.org/events/2016-sydney