Can you provide more info on the deployment failure? Is the application's failure to deploy triggering a .war.failed marker file?
The standalone instance Deployment folder ships with automatic deployment enabled by default. The automatic deployment mode automates the same functionality that you use with the manual mode, by using a series of marker files to indicate both the action and status of deployment to the runtime. For example, you can use the unix/linux "touch" command to create a .war.dodeploy marker file to tell the runtime to deploy the application.
It might be useful to know that there are in total five methods of deploying applications to AS7. I touched on this in another topic here : JBoss AS7 *.dodeploy files
I tend to use the Management Console for application management, but I know that the Management CLI is very popular among other uses also. Both are separate to the deployment folder processes. See how you go with the other methods to fit your needs.
If you search for "deploy" in the Admin Guide, you can see a section on the Deployment Scanner and a more general deployment section (including the CLI): https://docs.jboss.org/author/display/AS7/Admin+Guide
<deployment-scanner auto-deploy-exploded="true"/>
– Pittman