I saw a post on Steve Boese's HR Technology blog that caught my eye, mainly because I love to read stuff that confirms my own pet ideas, and especially the ones I bet my own dear dear money on.

What we are betting on is that corporate (and some third-party) recruiters would love to use MS Outlook as their primary ATS interface. Not a mere integration, but a total mashup- toolbars, menu items, pane views; the works, so you never (or rarely) leave Outlook.

As Steve said "most would not argue that corporate workers spend ridiculous amounts of time in Outlook"

SAP has been on top of this trend, and the response we get when people see our prototype ranges from highly interested to actually gobsmacked- which is motivating to us to say the least. The skills needed to execute this kind of project are old school Windows stuff, so its been interesting watching the code come together while the team relearned some old tricks and found some new ideas too.

PCRecruiter is about to become the ultimate Outlook accessory for staffing, and I think generally speaking, old ideas about application interfaces are going to change as point vendors provide semi-invisible sets of functionality to end-users thru interfaces provided by others.