When it comes to OpenSSO, the idea of Centralized Agents is a big deal. That's one of the ease-of-use features that's coming with OpenSSO. There have been a lot of little niceties made along the way that make the centralization of the agents even easier for customers. As the OpenSSO builds continue, configuring the agents in the OpenSSO Console has become simpler (step by step) for customers.

If you have installed earlier builds along the way, you've seen some of the improvements. I have included a couple of screenshots of the OpenSSO Console, showing the Policy Agent property views. These properties are map constructs. A map property is a property where a value is mapped to a key. In earlier builds, you had to enter more complicated information in a field. Now, the more complicated stuff is handled behind the scenes. You just enter a map key in one field and it's value in the other.

Hopefully, the inline help gives you enough information to understand what to enter for the map key and value. The inline help has become more thorough also, build by build.

Furthermore, if you need more detailed info then is available in Help, you'll be able to find it as I continue to work on the Policy Agent 3.0 Properties wiki. For example, the J2EE agent property listed below, Agent Filter Mode, is pretty involved. However, there's a description on the wiki for it now: http://wikis.sun.com/display/OpenSSO/j2eeagentfiltermode

Such descriptions are a work in progress. They can be continually improved upon as various deployment scenarios bring up new questions about a property.

A Web Agent Map Property

A J2EE Agent Map Property

The Agent Filter Mode property above is interesting because it highlights the global option, which applies to some J2EE map properties. Some J2EE map properties can apply to specific applications on the application server or globally to all the applications on the application server. The inline instructions above describe how to apply the property globally to all applications or individually to specific applications.