In a Deployment Management scenario, the stream encoding specifies which character encoding scheme OpenText PPM's command execution engine is to use to send and receive commands to a remote computer (via SSH or FTP/SCP). This setting is important if your OpenText PPM instance supports multiple languages, especially in supporting remote executions in IT environments where non-English operating systems are more common.
When configuring an Environment in PPM, the stream encoding for the client (token: CLIENT_STREAM_ENCODING) specifies which encoding the client machine uses and therefore, the encoding that PPM uses in communicating with the client machine.
The stream encoding for the PPM Server (token: SERVER_STREAM_ENCODING) specifies the encoding the server machine uses and, therefore, the encoding that OpenText PPM uses to communicate with that server machine.
This is important if OpenText PPM is installed on a machine whose default encoding is set to, say, UTF-8, but must communicate with remote computers that have, for example, Shift-JIS (a Japanese encoding) or CP-1251 (a Latin encoding) as the default encoding. Having this information known and configured in advance helps OpenText PPM send messages and commands that those machines can correctly interpret and to decode messages that the remote machines return.