May I throw my two cents in here. Judy is right, but for reasons that I've yet to see voiced on this thread. DMS installations of GroupWise 5, SoftSolutions, PC-Docs, Visual Recall, etc. are widely deployed and used daily for mission critical applications. The document in a DMS is tightly controlled by version number and has many of the meta data attributes mentioned by Judy in the quoted reply below.
Most metadata stays the same whether a document is MOVEd or COPYd, but there are exceptions.
It should be possible to set metadata using HTTP, however it turns out to be expressed. And the metadata should get updated properly when a document gets COPYd or MOVEd.