I work for a University and my current assignment is to create an "online catalog" that should replace the printed one. One of the things that the Provost especially wants is to have the courses and the degree requirements imported from our back-end system (SCT SIS OnCourse). Unfortunately, while my department's been charged with this task, we're technically Marketing, and Information Technology isn't really helping us at all. At all. I don't even have the ability to log in to the system from which I'm supposed to be importing this data.

So here's my shot-in-the-dark. Is there anybody here who can point me toward any background information about SCT SIS OnCourse, specifically how it stores requirements? I know that's ridiculously obscure but just about anything would be a huge help.

EDIT: It's pretty clear nobody here has any knowledge of SIS OnCourse ... but I was able to get my hands on the part of the system that outputs degree requirements. The problem isn't that we can't get them, but that the format in which they're output is not something that can be parsed back into a logical structure. So I asked for the program that makes the audits and was warned that it was a formidable "twenty-five hundred" lines of COBOL nightmare.

I don't know much about COBOL, but I figured that it's only 2500 lines and it shouldn't take me long to sift through. Well, little did I know that the not-so-English-speaking programmer I talked to hasn't quite grasped the difference between hundred and thousand. Shockingly, I've actually been able to take that 25,000 lines and make some sense of it, but it's really slow going.

But that's just an aside ... my question: is there some sort of IDE or text editor out there that supports COBOL? I'd really love it if I could get some code coloring here, or even go to a variable's declaration directly instead of searching through text.

(This code really sucks too. 25,000 lines and the only comment is the copyright: 1987.)