Hi NEd,

I spent the last year working on a document handling system. What we did 
was with all documents that should be archived through our web were FTP'd 
to a directory on the Web server via a client, and all we stored was the 
TEXT from the document (For easy searching through the documents later on 
via the SQL Server), AND the path to where the Document was saved. This 
means that we have search and get functionality from our SQL Server.

It was pretty fast. Theres an Idea for you.