My thoughts around GEM are to work with a file watcher on the LUA, and a web service on the website.

The GEM LUA is actually pretty easy - I found an LUA DLL (written in .NET, no less) out there that can interact with the LUA - and I wrote an app a year ago that could parse the GEM LUA into a rich-client data grid (did the time parsing, sign-ups, everything)...which wouldn't take too much work to get to be a two-way update - the watcher would tell you when the file changes via WoW, and the web service would allow you to ping the DNN database to look for changes on that end. On the GEM site, they had discussed hooking it up successfully to a phpRaid, but the hardest part was synchronising across a p2p user base (and GEM has all kinds of synchronization issues just to itself these days...especially when you update one person in the GEM channel *shudder*).

And I completely agree with the Armory thought - the only issue for me is capturing the player/officer notes. But it's a minimal loss, in the grand scheme of things. Have you figured out the best way to read the Armory data? (I've been playing with some code someone posted on PopFly for reading/using the Armory)

That was exactly my thought - a .NET v3.0 Windows Service (because I think WCF could be well suited to this) with a file watcher on the LUA and a web service handle back to the database. Then GEM can channel it back from the LUA out to the other peers. But you're right - it is coming together quite nicely!

The only wierd thing would be people trusting that you're not doing anything funky with their machines.

Soooo...the question next becomes how to work on this. Codeplex? E-mail and zip files?

Okay - I've set up a CodePlex project and I've dropped you an e-mail.