Installation and Upgrade Guides › Policy Server Installation Guide › Configuring the Policy Server for an International Environment › Planning Considerations Before Installing the Policy Server

Planning Considerations Before Installing the Policy Server

Consider the following before installing the Policy Server:

• Use supported operating system and third-party software
• Create supported databases
  • Before creating databases for storing policy or session data, make sure they are formatted with UTF-8 encoding.
  • User store databases are not limited to UTF-8 encoding. User databases may be created in the local character set encoding.

    Example: to store Japanese characters in Oracle 9i, the database can be created in JA16EUC encoding or JA16SJIS encoding.

    Note: The Active Directory namespace does not support multi-byte characters. Regardless of the code page you are using, SiteMinder treats characters as they are defined in Unicode. Although your code page may reference a special character as single-byte, SiteMinder treats it as a multi-byte character if Unicode defines it as such.

• All Administrative UI fields support multi-byte characters.
• Some of the FSS Administrative UI fields support multi-byte characters.
• Some Policy Server components support multi-byte and ASCII characters in an internationalized environment.
• SiteMinder supports multi-byte character (MBCS) URLs.

Note: For a list of supported CA and third-party components, refer to the SiteMinder r12.0 SP2 Platform Support Matrix on the Technical Support site.