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, 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. 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) or documents Zope does not know (e.g. PowerPoint; there is an import filter for MS Word!) and handling very large files in general. 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. Cheers, Joachim Werner iuveno AG