I read a good article about the new Deployment features on MOSS (M$ Office Sharepoint Server) by Tyler Butler. I am extremely interested to see where M$ see themselves against the likes of RedDot and Teamsite. There main flaw for a Enterprise level CMS is the lack of deploying content out through a firewall to an external facing server as Tyler explains. The article basically explains that MOSS will basically export the project and re-import it at the other end, but unlike CMS 2002 where this was a manual process, this can now be automated. This is good news for MCMS projects, but still leaves me with a few questions which I've left for Tyler to ponder.

MOSS per web server instance
If they are importing at the external end, that means you need to instances of MOSS, and then if you have load balanced servers, you would need one for each. So the cost of this may be a deciding factor.

Static pages
The second thing was, can MOSS simply deploy out static files across FTP? This would allow you not to be reliant on MOSS on the external farms and increase performance.

Synchronisation
Can MOSS handle a load balanced environment, how does the CMS stay in sync with more than one instance at a time? This is another disadvantage of a 'dynamic CMS' over a 'deployment CMS'.

Security
Also, if MOSS is on the external farm, do you need to expose your AD security out to this CMS for it to function properly? What Sharepoint features would likely to be exposed on the external side? If it is purely just to render the pages, can you just run on the base Sharepoint server that comes with Windows Server 2003?

Be interesting to see some further information on these areas.