I have talked with a few people that work in campus IT about their catalog management systems. The general feeling is that they wish there was something better out there. I have a little experience with ACMS from the admin side, but most of my experience comes from the student-facing side, which is generally pretty awful.

I completely agree that I need to understand the administrative side of this better. My only problem is that I can't get access to existing systems. I'll probably need to find people who deal with this on a daily basis to get that information.

I do plan on having a nice REST API for importing from old systems. I also intend to write middleware for importing from the current big players. I was inspired to add that to my to-do list by how easy BitBucket made it to transfer all of my private repos over from GitHub.

Good point about existing ERP systems. I'll have to look into how integration with the big players(SAP, etc) in that arena works.

Thanks for the feedback!