Excellent Reference on MOSS Content Deployment
One of the big pain points with SPS 2003 was the fact that once you went to production all subsequent changes needed to be made real-time in your portal. It made it hard to grow (or change) the intranet while managing risk to overall content management. This was a big shock to IT folks who were used to the traditional web application deployment of 'staging' to 'production'.
MOSS 2007 includes content deployment which supports the traditional three tier deployment strategy (authoring-staging-production). This is a big improvement!... Unfortunately, there is not a lot of documentation on configuration. However, I found a good resource. Jackie Bodine wrote a blog post entitled "Content Deployment – Step By Step Tutorial" (http://blogs.msdn.com/jackiebo/archive/2007/02/26/content-deployment-step-by-step-tutorial.aspx) that includes step-by-step instructions and screenshots. Well worth the read!