SSIS Capabilities

I am starting on a project where we will be using SSIS. I am totally new to it and would like to ask for your input on whether SSIS can do what I want it to do.



What we are wanting to do is to take data that is loaded into a queue table, and then possibly transform it a bit and load it into a common db as a batch. After that, subsets of that data should then be replicated to other databases based on some criteria. So what we end up with is one database with all the data and two (for now) databases, each with a subset of that data.



Ideally we would want our backend apps to work with the data in the common database and our frontend apps to work with the data in the two other databases.



So I have a couple of questions.



Can SSIS do two-way replication? So if the frontend changed one of the subset databases, could it replicate the change to the common database? And likewise, if the backend changed the common database, could it replicate the change to one of the subset databases?



What is a good way to execute a package from code? For example, from code we would load some tables, and then we would like to execute the SSIS package after that to go through the tables and transform and send that to other tables in one big batch job.



Is it possible to look at the status of package execution from another computer other than the one running the package? I know one way is just for the package to write to a table what it is doing and that table can then be looked at. I was wondering if there was some more elegant way of doing this.



We are also looking at whether we can do our archiving process from SSIS. All it involves is taking the data in the common database and transforming it to xml and outputting it as a file. Is there a way to write out to an xml file? I saw that you can read in xml in SSIS, but I didn't see a way to output xml.



Those are all my questions for now. If you can help me out with even one of them, it would be much appreciated.



Thanks,

Raphael