The feature added in 2017 R2 was for authentication of the SOAP payload, not for managing headers within the payload.  PI remains unusable as a secure source of data for Maximo without it because you can't configure a MAXAUTH header.

There's no way to configure headers for Notification Rules associated with a PI AF Services v2017 SP1 Elements with a SOAP or REST Web Service Endpoint.  Authenticated web services, such as our company's Maximo's meter data inbound service requires a MAXAUTH header with a base64-encrypted username:password string.  As a result, you can't use PI as a source of data for Maximo's condition-based maintenance triggers and automated asset meter reading updates, if Maximo uses authentication on its web services.  That's a fairly common scenario with a high rate of return on the PI-Maximo integration efforts for a lot of customers.

Right now, when you create an attribute in a template and assign it a Data Reference of PI Point, it defaults to a ConfigString of "\\%Server%\%Attribute%". %Server% has some known administrative headaches because what it populates as is dependent on the default server of the client tool. But in our company we are constantly switching between environments and this causes mismatches.

As recommended by OSI we have created an attribute in the root AF element called Server and gave it a string value of the name of our server. Now when we create a new attribute we map a reference to that attribute instead of %Server%. But if we forget to do that, then it goes back to %Server%. We would like a way to configure (on a global basis) the default ConfigString for new template attributes.