Use case : To store MicroSoft Word documents(each doc < 16 MB) and have full text content search on all the documents( 2 to 3 TB).
Although Sharepoint & Alfresco fit the bill I felt either of them would be an overkill for our use case so want to explore NOSQL DB space for the same. I heard NOSQL databases are not great for managing files, but being a novice I was not sure. Please suggest.
I would also go with the statement that you have heard. You may get confused by the term "document-oriented database". This category of NoSQL databases (MongoDB and CouchDB belong to it) are mostly storing their data in JSON or a JSON-like documents. They work best for this kind of data, but if you need to you could use alternate storage specifications for other data formats/use cases (for MongoDB this could be GridFS).
Nevertheless, I would recommend to stay with SharePoint. It was built for such use cases and if you use the managed meta-data and search features SharePoint works better than MongoDB or CouchDB in that kind of use case (and you don't have to built an application for accessing your data).
You might take a look at SenseNet (Disclosure: my company is a SenseNet solution partner.) SenseNet advertises itself as an open source "SharePoint Alternative", and leverages the best of both NoSQL and Relational databases by giving you a flexible schema system but stored in SQL Server.
It handles native MS Office documents easily, scales well, and is very performant. It uses the Apache Lucene for indexing, so if you upload a Word document, it's instantly indexed and searchable with Google-like commands. The learning curve is steep, but as with any sophisticated framework such as Sharepoint or Alfresco, you will have to evaluate the learning cost versus the benefits.
