Batch Automating Design update on 1000 InDesign files- Any ideas?

Question

I have just been brought in to a new company that issues one page (and separately saved) biographies using inDesign. The biographies use a standard style, with a great deal of reoccurant information (company details, logo etc) and then some personal info that makes up the biography.
The company recently underwent a re-brand which now means some 1000 of these biographies are displaying incorrect logos, colour schemes, font, watermark, contact information and company details.
I want to amend this, upgrading them to the new style guidelines. And for my personal sanity would like to automate the process as much as possible. Any ideas on how best to tackle this would be greatly appreciated!
My thoughts are as follows:
Partial Automation: - Perhaps I can export swatches, colour profiles and font settings from the updated templates and retrospectivly apply them to all the old ones. This would get me a good deal of the way there... but would still leave an issue on changing all new company details. If I could apply this in bulk I could flag the files for a small amount of editing next time they're needed.
Partial Automation: - Perhaps with a better understanding of the master pages tools I could create a default collection of swatches and space layout and import data into certain fields manually?
Full Automation: - I would love it if some combination of the above and InDesign scripts were possible to use to achieve this... but I am not optimistic. Perhaps the better idea is to use the exportallstories.js script to scrape all the relivant data from my old files. From there I would need to write a python file to identify the relivant fields (namely: Name, Title, biography). I could then migrate these details to a spreadsheet and save it as a .csv file. From here I might finally be able to re-import it back into my new template style using the <<Automated Data merge>> functions! It's a bit hieth robinson and would require some careful thinking on python expressions to get everything into .csv correctly.... but I think it's crazy enough to work. Any assistance on ideas here... or ideas about how I automate this to batch export to RTF (without 1000 tiedious "ok" dialog box clicks) would be greatly appreciated.
Any help, advice or pointers to relavant literature would be greatly appreciated.
Other Info:
I am on CS5
Windows 8 (i know... i know...)
I can get a python IDE up and running pretty quickly
Am happy to migrate this to my native linux for some parts of this process if there are tools/i can use the command line to get things done quicker!
Thanks
aBoL

Answer 1

Thanks all for the replies, it's given me a great deal to think on.
I have discoved some of this information is helpfully stowed on their website. Am going to contact the IT guy... if i could scrape right off it or better yet get access to their mySQL or whatever perhaps that'd be the fastest way to make my magic .csv and then batch import all.
As for plans b-z:
Eugene Tyson I looked into what you suggested about using books. I've still got a problem with importing all to one file if anyone knows a handy script that'd be much appreciated. I still obviously need to read up on master pages, when i've been dragging the style it seems to sandwich both the new style and old style together... so perhaps the data in isn't clean enough anyway (cleaning +1000 files would probably take longer than ctrl+c ctrl+v on all of em)
Peter, you're exactly right. Dirty in dirty out on data right? I've found that given that these files were all made with the same workflow, there is a great deal of consistancy. If its 100% i cannot yet tell, but if i export using the story export .js it seems to me i could either scalp off the bottom most five files (which seem to inevitably contain the valued data) or ponder clever if statements that will detect if it's got something that might be a name or just our latin placeholder text. But yes... i figure whatever a good deal of checking will be invovled.
Ariel, Your help would be greatly appreciated and I will pm you and anyone else who would be willing to get stuck into this challenge!! The main one for me right now would be the automated importing of files in bulk into a single story... perhaps the automated use of the other story export script... or if you were feeling extremely talented, doing all the work in indesign itself, opening files in sequence in a folder, stripping out the contents according to rules (that we could base on the regularity of it's content) or placement (they're generally in the same area) and saving that out to a txt file or even better a .csv!!
anyway I'm teetering between this being a fun challenge and a utter nightmare, but the looming idea of manual data entry is enough to propel me on. Any help / discussion or further thoughts would still be vastly appreciated!
thanks all and have a great weekend.