Document Management on a Shoestring: Access or HTML or ?

["Web Slinger" <webslingr -at- hotmail -dot- com>]

Fellow Techwhirlers -

I have been asked to devise an inexpensive "document management system" for 
our department of 25 or so employees. Some background:

-We're a regulated utility on a shoestring budget.

-I am not aware of any other departments in the company with a doc 
management system in place. Even the "forms" page on the intranet appears to 
be an HTML table with descriptions and links to PDF files.

-I've done an inventory of all of the documents we need to "manage".
We have approximately 100-150 files (and growing every day) in Word, Excel, 
PDF, Visio, and PowerPoint formats.

-We're a Novell/Microsoft shop.

-Most users in our department are NOT computer savvy.

We need the ability to associate the following information with each 
document:

-author's name
-document name
-version number
-permissions
-brief description of document

At my old company, we used Lotus Notes document repositories. They worked 
great, but we don't have anything like that here. We do not have an Intranet 
page for our group.

We do have Microsoft Access. I've never used Access in my life, but am 
willing to learn it quickly if it might be a solution. What I'm envisioning 
is having a shortcut to the "document database" on each user's desktop. They 
would open up the database and be presented with information about each 
document, and links to the documents themselves.

QUESTION:  Is this doable? Or is there a better solution that I should 
consider? Either way, we need to show success with this "shoestring" project 
before moving on to something better.

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Cheryle


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