Let me start saying that I am completely new to SharePoint. Now, being that said, It has been a little more than two months that I have been reading about MOSS and designing the taxonomy for an Enterprise Document Management System to be hosted on MOSS 2007.
Unfortunately, I was given a development server just a couple of weeks ago, and the server is very resource limited which slows down my progress considerately.

Anyway, based on the user's processes and current documents, I have identified almost 200 different document types. Most of this documents share various metadata such as Category, Document Type, Fiscal Year, Authors, etc.

Therefore, what I did is to differentiate each of this document types as content types with their associated metadata that would exist in different sub-sites and document libraries. But, I have a couple of doubts:

1) Suppose that there are documents that have the same metadata, let's call it "Case Status" column, which could be either "Open" or "Closed". And the way I would like the system to ultimately work is that on the Top site level, users could change the status for all inherited document's subsites at once. Is this possible? If so, how could this be achieved? From my understanding, site columns allow you to share columns options between different child content types, but it doesn't allow to share documents metadata values.

2) I believe that since documents metadata are nothing more than rows in one (or several) SQL Server, it should be fairly simple (and common practice) to allow document metadata to be shared and manipulated from forms. Is this actually possible?

3) I have searched on the web, and couldn't find good information regarding DMS on SharePoint (Content types. Document Libraries, Data Views, Content Queries, etc). All of the information is pretty basic, and doesn't give real life examples where documents relate to each. Are there any MOSS Admin or developer books that you could recommend?