UPDATED 11:20 EST / DECEMBER 29 2016

CLOUD

Amazon Web Services’ WorkMail gets support for Outlook, other email clients

Not even the holiday season can slow down Amazon.com Inc.’s aggressive feature development roadmap, as the company Wednesday rolled out support for the IMAP data transfer protocol to AWS WorkMail.

The addition to its cloud-based email and calendar service will enable users to view their messages through a wide range of popular email clients. The list includes Apple Mail, Thunderbird and Microsoft Outlook, which is used throughout in the corporate world.

Amazon likely is hopin that allowing users to access WorkMail via their existing clients will make it easier for organizations to switch from competing email servers. After all, the less workers have to change their routines in order to adopt a new service, the smoother a migration tends to go. Some adjustments are still required behind the scenes, but the new IMAP support accounts for that as well.

Amazon said the update allows companies to integrate WorkMail with backup systems, compliance tools and practically any other backend application that uses IMAP to pull information from workers’ inboxes. Moreover, the company has also taken measures to ease the task of transferring data from rival email servers.

Among others, Amazon makes it possible to use a domain name across both WorkMail and Exchange inboxes while enabling end-users to easily sync calendar information across the two systems. The idea is to ease migration efforts for large companies that can require months to fully switch over to a new email server. It’s one of several examples where Amazon has decided to provide integration with a competing provider’s product in an effort to make its public cloud more appealing.

On the security front, for example, Amazon lets customers use Microsoft Active Directory to regulate access to their infrastructure-as-a-service deployments. And the provider’s container service offers a choice between a built-in orchestration engine or the open-source Kubernetes framework from Google. The search giant is Amazon’s other major rival besides Microsoft in the cloud-based email market.

Image via Pixabay

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