Having this server and being the fist Java EE 5 certified is really nice and I am sure it will run most of the time without any problems but from time to time you will have to administer it and maybe change something on it. And you need the tools to do it. These are described in the Administration Guide, so here I’ll just give you a quick preview of what’s new. After you finish the installation you get the SAP MMC console and also the telnet interface to the engine. For simple administrative tasks they provide nice coverage of your needs and I use them in my everyday work. What happens if you want to do more complex stuff like checking the logs your application have produced or change the severity of your location or category? If you remember the old days of NetWeaver04 and NetWeaver04s there was a standalone Swing tool called Visual Administrator (VA). Its purpose was to manage Java part of the NetWeaver stack and it was not always easy to use unless you were well trained for it and had deep knowledge of the architecture of the NetWeaver. As a web-based tool it only needs a browser to run and can easily go over firewalls. Nowadays the standard is web-based tools, hence the standalone VA is gone. What you have now is a web based tool called the NetWeaver Administrator or shortly - NWA. 
Each service in VA provided certain functionality and you needed to know the exact service in order to do what you need. You had to be a NetWeaver and Java expert. For instance if we take logging you need the LogConfigurator and LogViewer services but with them it is easy to guess what they do. With NWA you get task-oriented navigation and there is no need to know the architecture of the Java AS to do administration and you even do not have to know what Java AS service is. You only need to know what you want to do from administration perspective, i.e. start/stop, change configuration, view logs and so on. Functionality is grouped in work centers and work sets based on different tasks you have to do. Also there are many new and cool things in NWA which you do not get in VA. So let’s take logging as an example. Bellow you see a snapshot of the LogViewer. It is much easier to use it than the VA version, you can set different filters and define custom views and save them for future use. Moreover – now Log Viewer merges all your log files into one data set and you can search and filter through all of them in one go. Over the web. Even connect to a system on which the Java engine is down. No files exchanged. There is also navigation between related functionality and from LogViewer you can access the LogConfigurator to change severities and go back to the LogViewer. Another big advantage is that there is common UI Look and Feel for all functionality exposed in NWA. 
As a real preview only part of the functionality that will be available is present in NWA. Another big advantage of NWA over VA is that it can manage more than one system ay a time in case you have a landscape of systems but this is out of scope for the SDN preview installation. NWA is available as an add-on in your installation of the SDN preview. You can install NWA by running the install.bat located in folder \JP1\JC00\j2ee\NWAdmin. In case you have made a custom installation it is possible that path differs. NWA is located at http://localhost:5XX00/nwa where XX is the system number of your installation. For default installation it is 00 and the http port must be 50000.
Each service in VA provided certain functionality and you needed to know the exact service in order to do what you need. You had to be a NetWeaver and Java expert. For instance if we take logging you need the LogConfigurator and LogViewer services but with them it is easy to guess what they do. With NWA you get task-oriented navigation and there is no need to know the architecture of the Java AS to do administration and you even do not have to know what Java AS service is. You only need to know what you want to do from administration perspective, i.e. start/stop, change configuration, view logs and so on. Functionality is grouped in work centers and work sets based on different tasks you have to do. Also there are many new and cool things in NWA which you do not get in VA. So let’s take logging as an example. Bellow you see a snapshot of the LogViewer. It is much easier to use it than the VA version, you can set different filters and define custom views and save them for future use. Moreover – now Log Viewer merges all your log files into one data set and you can search and filter through all of them in one go. Over the web. Even connect to a system on which the Java engine is down. No files exchanged. There is also navigation between related functionality and from LogViewer you can access the LogConfigurator to change severities and go back to the LogViewer. Another big advantage is that there is common UI Look and Feel for all functionality exposed in NWA. As a real preview only part of the functionality that will be available is present in NWA. Another big advantage of NWA over VA is that it can manage more than one system ay a time in case you have a landscape of systems but this is out of scope for the SDN preview installation. NWA is available as an add-on in your installation of the SDN preview. You can install NWA by running the install.bat located in folder \JP1\JC00\j2ee\NWAdmin. In case you have made a custom installation it is possible that path differs. NWA is located at http://localhost:5XX00/nwa where XX is the system number of your installation. For default installation it is 00 and the http port must be 50000.
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