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Amazon Takes On Microsoft, Google With WorkMail For Businesses
alphadogg writes Amazon Web Services today launched a new product to its expansive service catalog in the cloud: WorkMail is a hosted email platform for enterprises that could wind up as a replacement for Microsoft and Google messaging systems. The service is expected to cost $4 per user per month for a 50GB email inbox. It's integrated with many of AWS's other cloud services too, including its Zocalo file synchronization and sharing platform. The combination will allow IT shops to set up a hosted email platform and link it to a file sharing system.
My top priorities for email service are quality of spam filtering, support for unlimited aliases, search, and rules. I think labels work better than folders for categorization. I have not found any Amazon documentation which addresses these issues.
WorkFemail
What is this? Paradise By The Dashboard Light?
Bark less. Wag more.
I mean, when they get FISA/NSL/BS letter to search my company's R&D emails so they can steal my technology or commit insider trading... but my non-US company is hosted on non-US Amazon AWS, will they still acquiesce to their request?
My top priorities for email service are quality of spam filtering, support for unlimited aliases, search, and rules. I think labels work better than folders for categorization. I have not found any Amazon documentation which addresses these issues.
My top priority is privacy.
Does their service have built-in encryption, such that they cannot decrypt the message contents?
I can do spam filtering, searching, and other rule-based operations on my home system. What I *can't* do locally is prevent others from sticking their noses in my business.
Whether it be my ISP adding ads to the data stream for goods and services I might be interested in, or the website provider tailoring ads for goods and services that might be of interest to me, or my home country looking for perceived criminal activity, or someone *else's* country looking to steal corporate secrets or leverage me into forced compliance, or any of a number of other reasons.
Of late I'm actually pretty interested in the privacy aspect.
How high up on your list of priorities is privacy?
Another Kloud Service. At last my company can have its email scanned and delivered to my competitors. Just what I needed.
Most small businesses are better off entrusting their mail to a cloud provider than to try to run their own email service and trying to keep it secure and highly available.
everything else seems to be
My top priority is being able to have Thunderbird connect to the mail server. I much prefer having my email local, rather than in "the cloud".
Here is the link to Amazon's official announcement so you don't have to go through the networkworld article.
It is notable that this is not just about email as it also supports many of the other features offered by Outlook like calendaring, tasks, etc. It also works with existing Outlook and ActiveSync clients so it is easy for an enterprise to start using it.
As I'm not an administrator of mail systems, I would like to hear from some experts about how the features Amazon has introduced today compare to the existing enterprise offerings.
This is actually by design. Their model is not profit, it's growth and innovation. It's a new economy where the balance sheet is becoming less and less a key factor for large corporations, and for the most part shareholders are ok with it because investments are made in the short term and the skyrocketing share price is more attractive than actual equity or dividends.
I'm not saying I agree, just that this is not by mistake that they don't make a profit.
lucm, indeed.
I gave up on built-in spam filtering a long time ago. Instead I route email thru a cloud antispam provider. It's super cheap and very convenient.
lucm, indeed.
Amazon would do anything for your love, but it won't do that.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Although I don't agree with you... Spamfiltering means you need data (from a large number of users). Not having free accounts means much less abuse data. Their service will not be as good.
nosig today
. Anything cheaper and more administration friendly than Exchange is welcome.
That is where o365/hosted exchange comes in. Amazon are currently seeing MS market grow with triple figure growth percentages and email is one of the big reasons as enterprises no longer have to worry about the complexities of running it themselves.
How about IMAP support that doesn't completely suck?
o365 is such a huge POS.
> Rackspace
In general yes they're great, but when we used Rackspace, we used their proprietary garbage Microsoft Exchange product. That is probably what the GP was talking about. It is complete and utter garbage. It constantly loses email. After switching to running our own server (a ten year-old Dell with CentOS, Postfix, SquirrelMal, etc., all pretty easy to setup and all free), the amount of mail from customers more than tripled, and we had to hire new people. It saved our business. Because Microsoft is so embarrassed by that Exchange product, they can't release source code so Rackspace can't fix any of the problems. Exchange is a nightmare, but trying to do it at the scale of Rackspace is hell. There is a reason, for example, the forty person team at Microsoft I worked for from 2002-2007 had over $200k worth of hardware to run mail very poorly. We spent about $6k per user in just hardware! When you overspec hardware by that much, Exchange doesn't lose email as often, but even that massive kit would lose messages if someone attached a file sent to the entire team. Then Exchange would thrash for several minutes and lose all other incoming mail.
I managed exchange 2007 for 500 users and we had about $14K of hardware, including the replicated Exchange server in the remote data center (but not including the AD servers and the tape backup hardware). We lost the primary site a few times due to power failure, and we had a RAID controller failure in the remote node that brought it down, and we never lost any email or had any significant unscheduled downtime. We did have to restore a few deleted employee mailboxes from backup tape due to a lawsuit, but that wasn't a problem either. It was not trivial to set it up properly, but we paid a consulting company to come in for a day and validate our configuration.
If MS spent $6K per person on hardware, it's because they wanted to, not because they had to, we did it for $33/user in hardware costs.
I left the company as we were setting up the 2010 servers on brand new hardware (virtualized on VMWare, so it's hard to pin down the hardware costs). I'm no fan of Exchange, I think it's too difficult to set up properly and requires more hardware than it should, but when set up properly, it does run well. Paying professional services fees was well worth it to make sure we had it set up correctly.
Sounds like a legal, high-tech Ponzi scheme.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
support for unlimited aliases
I really REALLY wish gmail had this. Or at least 10 aliases if not unlimtied. yeah, you can create multiple accounts, but their integration on Google is terrible. I would pay for this.
Looks Good I wanna try this. Querease