You could probably achieve everything you stated using Zope and a few add-on products (Also freely available).

Do note that this would require development time on your part (Better they pay for your time than for someone else's software, right? :)

Zope could provide the security infrastructure, web interfacing capabilities, and database connectivity at a bare minnimum.

A few things to keep in mind will be how to index the excel and word documents for searching ... On a UNIX type platform, there are some tools, though not necessarily super-reliable. Maybe on windows you can have better tools available to you (Using the Python/COM interface for example).

I've never used an RDBMS to store entire files, so how I'm not sure how to interface Zope to a database that uses BLOB's or something of that nature, though I'm sure it can be done, someone on here can probably help you with that.

I would recommend you thoroughly research Zope and the "Products" to see if a combination of existing zope technologies will do the job for you. And although what you describe is doable, you may not be willing or have the time to go through the learning curve and so on ... But then the less one spends on software, the more they can spend on consulting/customization ... Also, you may find once you have learned how to leverage Zope that you will want to try and use it/recommend it for future clients ...

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.