Earlier I asked for suggestions on document management for the small business and invited comments. There were some good suggestions in the forum, as well as some that came by email. They were:

• Zope which was one of my first thoughts.
• Vignette's Business Workplaces which used to be called "Instraspect" and seems to have disappeared inside Vignette's Web site.
• Xerox DocuShare
• WorldOx a solution used by small law firms according to Dennis Kennedy
• AtomZ, who I'd always viewed as a search service (in fact Windley's Enterprise Computing uses AtomZ for search.
• Crown Peak, a hosted content management solution.

Of these, I have direct experience with Zope. Zope has the disadvantage that it would likely require some upfront customization to do just what is needed. On the other hand, the other's probably do as well, if they're customizable at all. If an out of the box solution is needed, that WorldOx, Intraspect, or DocuShare might be good candidates for further study.

I'm surprised that no one mentioned NextPage or Groove. NextPage may be out of reach of small businesses and Groove is seen more as a collaboration space. On the other hand, document management is partly about collaboration---that's why you need to manage documents most of the time.

This exercise started out from a question from a friend. I think I'll recommend he look at Zope first.