Plone is designed by default as a Content Management System (CMS) which can be used to create and manage public websites of various proportions. At the same time, Plone can handle management of files of any types, including images, documents, text files, and other. Plone is Open Source, which means it offers complete control over all components allowing it to fit your business processes perfectly.

Plone is shipped by default with versioning and revision control, advanced workflows and flexible permission based security model. Additionally, Plone has the capacity to handle very large amounts of data by storing all files on the file system rather than in the database (BLOB storage). This enhances the ability of Plone to scale to handle huge content repositories out of the box! The uploaded files are also indexed and can be searched alongside other content, such as Pages, Events etc.

With versioning and revision control, configurable workflows, flexible access control and efficient file handling, Plone can be used as a document management system out-of-the-box!

In order to improve the document management capabilities that Plone offers by default, the Open-Source Plone community has developed several important add-ons that make Plone even better and more advanced DMS. 

• plone.app.iterate that alows one to use a checkin / checkout procedure for content editing. It integrates versioning, locking and uses Zope techology adapters and events to allow for easy customisation.
• plone.app.workflowmanager provides a GUI for managing custom workflows in Plone
• collective.documentviewer enables users to view PDF and Microsoft Office files in the browser, with OCR support
• wildcard.foldercontents provides an improved file/content browser, with multi-upload functionality, better drag and drop implementation, shift-click selection and more.
• collective.solr  integrates Apache Solr into Plone, improving search quality and performance
• plone.app.ldap for LDAP and Active Directory integration
• eea.facetednav allows users to configure search and filtering options through-the-web, for easier management of data collections