We use eRoom an online collaboration tool, that is exactly what you need (although it has way more feature than just reading word or excel), the only thing is we pay almost 5000 $/month for a 100 users license....

That's what I would like to know if there is already a product in Zope that is an online collaboration tool

I was just looking at Zope 2.6.1 on your website and I would like to know if it or any other software you provide could help me fulfil certain objectives for an upcoming job.

A prospective client of mine requires a content management system. We are planning to install this on his server that houses the company’s intranet and we want to set up a system whereby if a user from another country logs onto this intranet site via the worldwide web (with a pre-defined USERNAME and PASSWORD) he could, according to his access privileges access a HTML or PHP page with a menu and search function and use this to search for a list of documents by certain criteria (for example by date or subject etc)
These documents will be contained within a database possibly MySQL or Oracle etc.
He will then see a webpage with the list of documents with links. When he clicks on one link, he will then see the document (through the web browser) and it could be a WORD or EXCEL document and he could have the option to download this by clicking a download button.
He could then alter this document in WORD etc (depending on the document itself) and then upload this to the same database on the intranet so that it replaces the old one.

This would work very much like Livelink (www.livelink.com)

Ideally it has to be a system that is easy to use especially by someone not used to IT.

I was looking at your website and I wondered if your software could meet the above requirements.

I would really appreciate it if you could get back to me as soon as possible as this client requires an answer within the next 2 days.