Through built in portal_tranforms for pdf, all you need to do is install pdftohtml package, and your uploaded PDFs are automatically full text indexed.

ODF support requires separate Product - AROfficeTranforms and ARFilePreview, once this and binary dependencies are installed, all uploaded ODF text documents and old OpenOffice documents are full text indexed. In addition you can get html previews.

One of the issues with managing workflows in documents is that it is difficult to do it in document formats without passing files around, or merging it and then tracking history changes. It's much easier to implement if using Plone's built in text/html online document content. You can track history/changes and everybody can lock/collaborate and see diffs. It also uses Plone's built in workflows. Usually though after it's done, you probably still want to polish it up for formatting and publishing, and want to export it to a standard document format or PDF.

That's where another Plone product comes into play, SmartPrintNG. This product then converts Plone content into different office formats. You can also customise the look and feel of the output. Thanks to purserj for pointing this product out to me.

What's great about all of this is that they're using Plone's simple UI which users seem to love. It follows familiar metaphor of files, folders and sharing them. The workflows and categorisation are also there, but don't get in the way.

Most of the info is due to the great work of Kagesenshi, and it's only his third week. It's been quite fun, to see a lot of interesting tech tasks being worked on that I couldn't get to due to lack of time. Even better, being a FOSS contributer to the Fedora Project, he knows all the stuff already and how things work including documentation setup, issue tracking and svn. He knows how to debug stuff and so on, with minimal guidance. He nows how to Google. Gasp!

It's made me set the bar higher now on possible interns and new hires for projects.

If you're an SME shop, look for FOSS contributers. If you're a student start getting involved in an upstream project now. You'll have the skills which took me a few months to teach already. You may even have a leg up over developers with a few years of working experience who are not involved with large FOSS projects.