Back in January of this year, I signed up for the preview of Amazon's WorkMail. AWM is a cloud-based email, calendar, and contacts application, marking Amazon's push into the Exchange Online space. In August of this year, Amazon notified me that I'd been admitted to the preview. I've been experimenting with AWM since then, using a spare domain I had on-hand. I'll concentrate here on a few aspects of the experience.

I'll start with something which may totally throw you, if you've been administering an O365 tenant. While O365 has multiple datacenters and regions, that's not prominent in your daily experience with the product. You supply your username (UPN), O365 locates you and your tenant, and you're in.

The second time I logged into the AWM admin console (after having setup my organization and custom domain), I was greeted by the "Get Started" screen, as Amazon couldn't locate an AWM org for me. Queue the panicked response.

If you click on "Get Started," AWM will take you through the process again, but fail because the domains involved (native and custom) are in use. Note the "Oregon" drop-down in the corner. My organization resides in Amazon's Northern Virginia datacenter. I selected N. Virginia from the menu, and landed where I'd expected to land:

I recommend recording your region, along with the following details about your organization and account:

• Access Key ID

• Secret Access Key

• Account ID

• Default Sign-in Link (https://<Account ID>.signin.aws.amazon.com/console/)

• Custom Sign-in Link if you create it (https://<yourdomain>.signin.aws.amazon.com/console/)

• These Organization settings:

• Organization ID

• Organization Alias

• Directory ID

• Directory Type

In a follow-up post, I'll highlight a few aspects of the webmail experience for end-users.

#AmazonWorkMailcloud #WorkMail #cloud