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For those of you that have installed PEP out there (and to some extent, Analytics before that), BEA started to embrace the concept of providing web-based configuration for their products. Analytics was pretty rudimentary, and PEP started to look a little better with its standardized approach. But the “Configuration Manager” is now going main-stream, and this is a big deal. Rather than answer a bunch of questions in the installer and manually tweaking the .xml configuration files, most of these settings have made their way into a consolidated interface. While you’ll still answer some basic questions in the installer, there’s now a pane that directs you to the Configuration Manager console to finish the configuration:

The Configuration Manager gives you details about what’s installed and what’s been recently installed:

Aside from the relief of not having to go into those configuration XML files as often, what’s really cool is that, in theory, this consolidated approach means no more duplicate data entry! Once you specify, say, the portal database settings, other applications can use those configuration settings as well:

 And it keeps going – here’s an interesting little tidbit. See that “Phone Home” icon? That’s going to allow you to securely send your configuration information to BEA support, hopefully eliminating some of that back-and-forth interrogation (“What version are you using? Can you email me that configuration file?”). Looks like it’ll allow automatic sending and the creation of a package you can inspect before emailing:

The only thing I haven’t really seen yet is what happens in a multi-system environment. Presumably, you will have to have a configuration manager on each machine (lowering the value of a consolidated configuration repository), but hey, small price to pay for such a slick new feature!