Part of the fun in working at SAP is that you get to play with new toys before they are available in the rest of the world. Sometimes I manage to find the time to explore new SAP components the way I used to 'play' with my old home computer: just start it up, check out the menus, press some buttons and see what happens. Of course, it's not as efficient as reading nicely finished documentation and doing what it tells you to do, but it certainly is more adventurous fun. Security Provider (user management: map users to user groups and security roles defined in the applications. Very helpful, and you must go here after deployment of applications that assigned users and user groups during deployment in 6.20 - 6.20 deploy time configuration changes now have to be made after deployment on 6.40)
Deploy service: deploy tool, incl start/stop of individual applications. (however, don't overuse this "pure J2EE" kind of deployment as an alternative to SDM deployment for SAP applications - it bypasses the SDM repository and all the nice dependency tracking and management SDM provides)
class path / class loader details per application: for me, this was helpful to find a really strange problem once: I had manipulated the Manifest of an SDA before deployment, and the application failed with a 'class not found' exception. I was expecting this to be due to my illegal manipulations. But using this visual admin service I was able to find out that one .jar needed by the application had been corrupted during deployment. After a second attempt to deploy the SDA with SDM, everything worked fine.
statistical records (activate writing of various performance statistics for the http server, JDBC usage and many other activities for display in ST03)
the various containers (EJB, web, web services etc): check and change all configuration settings
