One of the good things about MOSS is that it can roll content up to higher tiers using content rollup, search and RSS webparts. Combined with MOSS publishing templates you can create a very intuitive intranet or website.
The first few levels of a good intranet (and in fact most good websites) are usually given over as a "communications" layer where almost everyone in the organisation has read access. It's ideal for the MOSS publishing templates as information is typically read only, easily structured and not subject to huge upheavals and constant change. Surfacing niche information from different team sites usually works well for a broad consumer audience and allows the projects to concentrate on project related information and COMMS to fish for quality content.
Content rollup is a strategy! The right strategy with an understanding of rollup approaches allows you to package your intranet and allow it to grow from the inside – without many of the usual issues connected to information being hard to find for end users, and poor or cumbersome navigation making structure changes very difficult. Your intranet therefore becomes quite a tight entity where it counts, at the consumer face.
Content rollup in a nutshell means that as internal projects start to come on board and take advantage of the collaborative features they need to operate their project, whoever is responsible for managing the public face of the site can easily access and expose relevant information using content rollup through rollup, search and RSS webparts. Of course this does assume they have the correct read security model in place for content they wish to expose. So, team sites also need some form of structure thinking applied to them to make sure this is achievable, as do references to external sites and how that information might be surfaced on your own site using RSS perhaps, or custom search results.
A rich choice of pre-defined templates from FAQs and press releases to documents makes deployment easy at the public face, whilst helping to preserve flexibility and design freedom for more advanced users. Rolled up content rollup can be scheduled with start and expiry dates with optional email alerts to notify on expiry. You can allow any type of files you deem are appropriate, but its normally a good idea to restrict the use of video to designate areas – as video can show a speaker's personality it can be used to strengthen the corporate culture through messages from the CEO and other executives, or expose technical expertise though mysite blogs containing video. Again, easily surfaced on the intranet home page, but located elsewhere in the site structure. Of course video has a huge impact on bandwidth so has to be carefully planned in. The worst intranets are those bloated so much they underperform, or are so hard to navigate you can’t find anything.
So think carefully about how your Public area can surface information and links into you publishing site with a rollup strategy and you’ll have a very fluid intranet or internet service with little actual work.
Pointers:
This is an excellent article on how to do cross site collection rollup of content using a Search webpart.
http://www.devcow.com/blogs/jdattis/archive/2007/04/17/SharePoint-2007-How-to-Rollup-Content-from-multiple-Site-Collections.aspx
A great article on dynamically filtering the Content Query Webpart results
http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/archive/2008/02/18/Subclassing-the-Content-Query-Web-Part-Adding-Dynamic-Filtering.aspx
How to rollup content from more than one content type
http://www.sharepointblogs.com/mykiep/archive/2007/06/30/overriding-the-content-query-web-part.aspx
Using a Dataview and Sharepoint Designer to enhance rollup
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepointdesigner/archive/2007/04/24/spdatasource-and-rollups-with-the-data-view.aspx
A deep dive into the Content Query webpart
http://sharepointkb.wordpress.com/2008/07/25/sharepoint-content-query-webpart-customizable-powerful-and-invaluable-to-anyone-who-uses-sharepoint/
A multiple RSS feed consolidation webpart
http://codeplex.com/FeedReader
A good write up on MOSS RSS Webpart
http://www.datasprings.com/Resources/ArticlesInformation/SharePointMOSS2007RSSFeeds/tabid/831/Default.aspx