Go Daddy has partnered with Microsoft to expand its email offering to mobile devices, to help clients improve worker productivity and communications regardless of physical location.

The new email plans from GoDaddy.com, including Personal Outlook, Outlook with Mobile and Group Outlook with Mobile, give its clients the ability to manage all of their online services via mobile devices.

"Given the strong market share of Go Daddy, especially with the small- to medium-sized businesses, expanding our email offering was the logical next step for our customers," said Jonathan Cottrell, general manager of productivity applications for Go Daddy Group Inc., Scottsdale, AZ.

"We believe that by making Hosted Microsoft Exchange available to everyone, and even more importantly, easy for everyone, the offering would help anyone from small businesses without IT departments, to sole proprietors, to just plain busy people who want to stay connected wherever they go," he said.

GoDaddy.com claims to be the world's largest domain registrar and the largest hosting provider in North America.

The company also claims that its email plans let small business owners focus on improving the productivity of their business, instead of dealing with IT issues.

Its email plans offer on-the-go access to calendar, address books, tasks and e-mail on virtually any device, including the Web and mobile devices, as well as computers in the office or at home.

The platform is designed to provide better collaboration through appointment scheduling, assigning tasks, delegating access to e-mail and a common address book.

Microsoft claims that these are all core features of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 and Microsoft Entourage 2008.

Go Daddy also accommodates Mac users with Entourage 2008.

"Cost-efficiency, simplicity and centralization are the key benefits of this offering to Go Daddy and our customers," Mr. Cottrell said. "First, the offering we've made available to our customers in partnership with Microsoft is affordable, which has been a staple of Go Daddy's business from the very beginning.

"Affordable domains, hosting, Web site creation and email are all very important to Go Daddy, and it will remain that way," he said.

There are no upfront hardware and software costs for these services, which often can prevent small and medium-sized businesses from realizing the benefits of corporate-grade IT services.

Those costs can also create challenges associated with help-desk support and ongoing system maintenance.

"Simplicity is just as important," Mr. Cottrel said. "With many of the Hosted Exchange offerings available in the marketplace, the setup and management process can be cumbersome.

"We've tried to remove that difficulty, and for those that don't have all the technical know-how, we also have our 24/7 world-class customer support available to help people through that process," he said.

Go Daddy has not served mobile advertising to promote its Microsoft Exchange offerings.

"We are currently engaged in communicating with our existing customers via mobile devices," Mr. Cottrell said. "The types of messages we currently send include renewal notices and purchase confirmations."

Go Daddy has a number of marketing tactics in place that it will be rolling out over the coming months.

"We've kicked things off by first making the service and getting the word out to current customers via email newsletters, our Web site, call-center support and other channels, but of course this is just the first step," Mr. Cottrell said. "Search marketing, direct mail and some branding plays are also in the future."

Go Daddy is a provider of services that let individuals and businesses establish, maintain and evolve an online presence.

Go Daddy provides a variety of domain name registration plans and Web site design and hosting packages, as well as a broad array of on-demand services.

These include products such as SSL Certificates, Domains by Proxy private registration, ecommerce Web site hosting, blog templates and blog software, podcast packages and online photo hosting.

The Go Daddy Group Inc. has more than 31 million domain names under management.

Go Daddy claims that it registers, renews or transfers a domain name every second.

GoDaddy.com is the world's number-one domain name registrar according to Name Intelligence Inc.

GoDaddy.com is also rated the world's largest hostname provider according to Netcraft Ltd.

During 2007, The Go Daddy Group registered more than one-third of all domain names registered in the top six generic top-level domains, or gTLDs, including .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz and .mobi.
Founded in 1975, Microsoft is a giant in software and services.

"Last but not least, with all of the products and services that Go Daddy has made available to Web users and helping people and businesses alike start and manage their Web presence, we believe that enabling them to also centralize management of their Hosted Exchange solution where their domains and hosting and other services are managed just makes a lot of sense," Mr. Cottrell said.

"People everywhere, and especially Go Daddy's customers, are on the go today," he said. "They're mobile and they need to stay up-to-date with their contacts, schedule, and communication, whether they're at a computer or not.

"Our Outlook with Mobile plans and Group Outlook with Mobile afford customers that important ability."