Plone (collaborative CMS/portal - plone.org) + Archetypes (schema-driven content types with support for office docs http://sf.net/projects/archetypes) + ExternalEditor (used WebDAV to allow you to use msword as an editor) would be the kind of system you would want, and all the components needed here are free. Archetypes would even allow you to write a plugin to store your stuff in your relational database, if you decided that the Zope object database wasn't most appropriate. The only catch here is that you would likely need to do some glue coding to get all of this working, or get some assistance from a competent, experienced Plone developer. I bet you could engage in a chat about this on #plone on irc.freenode.net to get more input.

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.