I work in IT at a university and I'm working with about 5 different departments to develop a new process for students to apply to a specific school within the university (not the university as a whole). We're using a web-based college application vendor and adding the applicant questions for the school itself to the main university application. Currently the main application feeds into PeopleSoft. The IT staff here is building a new table to hold just our school's applicant data. I want to be able to access that data from PeopleSoft for use in external applications, but our IT staff doesn't really seem to understand what I'm requesting, as they simply tell me I can have access to the PS query tools. The problem is, I don't want to run just ad hoc queries, I want to be able to connect from outside PeopleSoft and show current data within the external app.

I am unable to find documentation or get a clear answer to my question. Does PeopleSoft support access via a web services API or anything similar, and does that sound like the right direction for me to take?