Using Drupal 4.7 as a kind of document review status log?

Can I do something like the following with Drupal and if so, which modules would be helpful/necessary?

I'm in discussion with an office that receives paper documents from various contributors. The documents are assigned to a staff member for review. Once reviewed, the persons who submitted the document need to be advised of the outcome of the review process. In addition, the persons who submit a document, along with other persons involved in the process, need to be able to check the status of the document review. Finally, the staff member conducting the review sometimes needs to request additional information from the persons who submitted the document.

Currently, the people who submit the documents have to call or email to inquire as to the status of the review. Requests for additional information are generally communicated via email or snail mail. And once a review is completed, the result is either sent to the submitting persons via email or snail mail.

So I'm wondering if the submission and review process could be put online, with the submitters and reviewers all set up as users. The documents are assigned a unique number so the ability of a person to log in and search for the status of a particular document review should be easy enough. And I believe that the person conducting the review could post a request for more information, or the outcome of the review, as a comment which could trigger an automatic email notification to the persons who submitted the document for review in the first place. An RSS feed would probably make more sense, but the users who would be served by this website are not necessarily that technically inclined. The email notification doesn't need to go to all users, only to the ones involved in the submission of the document .

Also, there is a need to be able to filter the documents submitted by review status / by reviewer / by submitter or any combination of the three. In other words, display all reviews that have a status of “pending review” or all reviews with a status of “pending review” where X is the assigned reviewer, etc.

Ultimately, I envision the document submission initiated through the website, with the documents being submitted as pdf files, rather than paper documents being shuffled around. But the needs listed above would have to be met first.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.

Roger