Amazon is preparing to launch an enterprise-focused email and calendar service called WorkMail through its Amazon Web Services section, with the aim of taking on Microsoft and Google.

The cloud-based service will include built-in support for Microsoft Outlook and mobile email clients, and enable users to send and receive email, manage contacts, share calendars and book resources without the need to buy or licence the software.

Customers can sign up for a preview of the software today, with a full launch planned for later this year. According to Amazon, the service provides businesses with reduced complexity and costs, strong security and privacy controls and migration tools to ease the transition from existing corporate mailboxes.

“Customers have repeatedly asked us for a business email and calendaring service that is more cost-effective and simpler to manage than their on-premises solution, more secure than the cloud-based offerings available today, and that is backed by the same best-in-class infrastructure platform on which theyre reliably running so many of the current (and future) workloads,” said Peter De Santis, vice president of Amazon Web Services Compute Services.

“We built Amazon WorkMail to address these requests and to help businesses achieve agility and cost savings by letting AWS manage the non-differentiated heavy lifting involved in corporate email and calendaring.”