Our customer wants a staging site and a production site, with nightly updates to production from whatever’s in staging. The staging site is on their intranet. The production site is exposed to Internet but in a DMZ. Each site will have it’s own SQL Server instance.

I’m planning a file and database synch process using xcopy or robocopy and a SQL compare and update tool, with a batch process or Powershell script to run it all, with Windows 2008 as platform.

The problem is, as I get RPC running between the two systems, I feel like I’m adding too many roles and features to the production box, and opening too many firewall holes for RPC, etc. It just feels unsecure. Am I right to be concerned? Is there an alternative?

(very sorry if multiple posts, the new Safari is behaving weird on this page)

Thanks, Sebastian! Sorry, I should have mentioned we have already ruled out Enterprise Content Staging (because it does not support anything other than HTML module).

We can live with overwriting many types of the content you mentioned. We plan to be selective in what we overwrite, too. If we can just get it working at all, we can figure out what to synch and what to leave alone.

Yes, that's a VERY interesting idea. I'll look into it. I don't know much about creating a VPN, maybe I can find someone else in the office who does.