Remote capture SharePoint?

[Lane Yu]

Our team is developing a product which can capture documents and other data from SharePoint sites. So far we know we can do this with SharePoint SDK, but our program has to be installed on the SharePoint server, or at least in the Server Farm. Thus it's very inconvenient to deploy the product. We would like to know if there's a way to capture the data remotely. That is, can we capture all the SharePoint servers from a central server? BTW, is it possible that we can know which machine has SharePoint server installed by scanning the AD? Thanks a lot.