Barely five days since the calendar reset, Amazon Inc. is already marking its first major product launch of 2016. The new iteration of WorkMail now generally available from its U.S. and Ireland data center packs a host of improvements over the early version that was previewed to customers last January, including compatibility with the desktop and mobile editions of Microsoft Outlook.

The vendor hopes that allowing workers to access the platform through a familiar interface will make it easier to switch over from Redmond’s rivaling email service, which boasts a significant head start in the enterprise. Many companies have been using the on-premise version of Exchange since long before its cloud-based successor was released, a fact that makes the prospect of an organization-wide migration even more daunting for CIOs than it otherwise would be. As a result, Amazon needs every feature and convenience its engineers can muster in order to draw customers away from its competitor.

In addition to Outlook, WorkMail is also able to plug into Microsoft Active Directory deployments, which makes it possible to to reuse user settings and security configurations from Exchange without having to reimplement everything manually. That can potentially be a major time-saver for large organizations with upwards of thousands of workers using the system. Amazon is complementing the functionality with a free inbox transfer tool that extends the convenience of automatic migration to emails, calendar items and related data.

The utility only works with Exchange on launch, but there is more than a good chance that the company will eventually add support for other popular corporate email services such as Gmail for Work. Like Redmond, Google heavily competes with the cloud titan in its infrastructure-as-a-serivce home turf and boasts a similarly big lead on the productivity front. The release of WorkMail into general availability concludes the first leg of what is emerging as an aggressive catch-up effort that will likely rank high on the agenda for Jeff Bezos’ firm in 2016.

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