www.johntimney.com

MOSS audit logs if enabled and left to go wild can grow very fast indeed.  Every 150,000,000 entries will consume about 40gig of database space.  So about 300 bytes per audit record give or take a few bytes.

if you enable item level auditing then this will grown at a rather rapid rate and few architects actually consider this additional space requirement when they plan their corpus storage.  

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb397403.aspx

Working this out is based on the number of transaction per day that will be audited, so you need to know which sites will have auditing enabled.  

In a site trying to achieve compliance, or prove an audit trail as legally admissable the audit storage requirements can be taking up space that the MOSS admin has not factored in, and can't find.  If you have vanishing space - look here first!

The lesson here is don't enable auditing without thinking carefully about the impact of it from a performance perspective (item level auditing is a performance killer) and from an audit management perspective.  Fortunately, Microsoft recently released the
the infrastructure update for MOSS which contaisn the new Trimauditlog Stsadm command.  It basically allows you to manage the audit table and remove old entries (hooray!) without hacking the DB audit table which is of course unsupported.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc706879.aspx

One tip worth remembering.  if you are clearing out the dbo.AuditData table you might want to back it up.  This is explianed in the Item Level auditing paper

By default SharePoint 2007 has Diagnostic logging turned in Central Administration logging and reporting, and typically stores 48 hours worth of log data. The default setting can be as much of a killer as the Audit logs to the unwary.

As well as Audit Logs, Diagnostic Logging can also consume a considerable amount of disk space in the “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\LOGS” folder.

On a heavy site, each log file can be about 150-200 meg. With new log files being created every 30 minutes this can quickly eat up 15 to 20Gb of space over a 2 day period. So be careful that your root partitions on your WFE servers are large enough to cater for poor diagnostics logging planning.

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