I am working on an large enterprise rollout of MOSS, and have a few
questions about best practices for site templates.


I am going to have 1 site that has like 6 webparts, 4 of which will
probably be Content query web parts, but the rest will be local only
to the site users (like discussion/calendar). The 4 that are CQWPs
will all pull data from a central spot and use audiences to deliver
the proper content. If I create a site template off this base site
and then provision 400 sites using this template, are my hands
basically tied when i want to roll out a change to all 400 sites? In
SPS 2003 i ran into this issue as well, and there was not a way to
update any sites after they have been provisioned without manually
going to each site.

I was also thinking about just having 1 site instead and then have
audiences control content, but there could end up being 1000s of
records in each list, and from the Large lists whitepaper on msdn,
this probably won't be a good idea as preformance will suffer in the
long run since I was not going to use folders in the custom list.

However, it would be a heck of alot easier to manage if I just had
1 site that all users hit, espeoially since I will be delivering
content to my custom list via an approval process.
Our user base on the 400 sites would probably be like 10 users/site,
so it seems I may be able to use my 2nd alternative to just have 1
site and use audience targeting provided i don't have 10,000 list
items in the one main list.

so alot of blah, i know , but here is my summary:
I have 2 alternatives:
1. 1 site that 3500 users use with aud. targeting for content (2000
recs/year in some of the lists).
-OR-
2. 400 individual sites created off base template

Does anybody have experience with this and care to share your
experiences or advice?

Sys Arch: medium farm, MOSS, x64, Kerberos (if i ever get it
working), with 2 WFEs , if that helps...