To start 2016, NEBytes welcomes back Microsoft MVP John Timney to hear about the clever stuff he's been doing with Azure Machine Learning:

Improving SharePoint Project Cost Estimation with Azure Machine Learning

Costing SharePoint projects, or any projects for that matter can be really difficult, but what if you could simplify that dramatically by looking at data science and Azure.

Bring on machine learning and you suddenly have an opportunity to amalgamate your legacy cost information to better predict future outlay for pretty much anything. What makes it even better is that it’s not really very hard to start using Azure Machine Learning and then to move on to looking at alternative strategies for other types of predictive outcomes, and you don’t have to be an experienced data scientist to dip your toe in the water and get real fiscal potential from drag and drop solutions in Azure.

"Machine Learning" made its first appearance on the Gartner Hype cycle chart this year, but has already past the peak of inflated expectations and now takes the place of Big Data as a critical skill for business to acquire.

Join SharePoint MVP John Timney as he takes you through this exciting and must learn thing that is AML, provides some light touch insight into its operational domain and demonstrates how to start taking early advantage of it.

In addition, NEBytes own Jonathan Noble will be talking about adopting some DevOps practices with Visual Studio Team Services (formerly Visual Studio Online):

Making your Operations workload more visible with Visual Studio Team Services

Developers may have been using similar tools for a while, but in the DevOps era it's time for the sys admins to catch up. Visual Studio Team Services offers a number of features that operations folk can take advantage of, whether you're closely collaborating with devs or not.

Microsoft MVP for Cloud and Datacenter Management, Jonathan Noble, will share his experience with VSTS's Kanban board and work item queries for better visualising Work In Progress, and tying that in to hosted version control for PowerShell scripts, DSC configurations, etc.