I need to implement/acquire a document management system (for chip engineering docs) that works well with Zope. I have no experience in the field of DMS, so can someone point me in a good direction.
You can use Zope directly as a DMS. It offers FTP and WebDAV access, document histories,
Versioning is a requirement. What are you referring to when you say "document histories"? ...Zope's Versions and undo lists? ...or something else?
full text and metadata indexing etc. Of course there is some missing functionality, but this is being worked on, e.g. in the Content Management Framework project.
I will check in to that in detail. Thanks.
The only serious problems you might get with Zope "out of the box" are full text indexes for very large documents (ZCatalog might not be good enough or too slow for that)
Most of our documents are modest in size. I don't know of any "very large" ones. or documents Zope does not know (e.g. PowerPoint; there
is an import filter for MS Word!)
We will have PDF, Word, and PowerPoint files in the system. Full text indexing is not a stated requirement, only keyword indexes; but I suspect it's easier for me to do full text indexing than to get good keyword abstracts from the originators. I think I can handle indexing PDF files using XPDF; do you have a pointer for the MS Word filter? Anyone, know about indexing PPT?
and handling very large files in general.
Not a problem here.
But if you choose to store all files in the filesystem and only keep references in the Zope object database, the latter can be solved.
If you tell us more about the functionality you are going to need (either privately or on the list), we might be able to support you as we are working in this area, too.
I think the only other requirement I haven't already mentioned is a concept of ownership, so that only the document originator can check in new versions of a document. That shouldn't be hard with Zope. -- Thank you for your suggestions, -- Loren