"Global managed" beans is the term I use in this post to describe beans that are used across applications. Global managed beans contain helper - or utility - methods like or instead of JSFUtils and ADFUtils. The difference between global managed beans and static helper classes like JSFUtis and ADFUtils is that they are EL accessible, providing reusable functionality that is ready to use on UI components and - if accessed from Java - in other managed beans.

For example, the ADF Faces page template (af:pageTemplate) allows you to define attributes for the consuming page to pass in object references or strings into it. It does not have method attributes that allow command components contained in a template to invoke listeners in managed beans and the ADF binding layer, or to execute actions. To create templates that provide global button or menu functionality, like logon, logout, print etc., an option for developers is to deployed managed beans with the ADF Faces page templates. To deploy a managed bean with a page template, create an ADF library from the project containing the template definition and import this ADF library into the target project using the Resource palette. When importing an ADF library, all its content is added to the project, including page template definitions, managed bean sources and configurations.

More about page templates

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E17904_01/apirefs.1111/e12419/tagdoc/af_pageTemplate.html

Another use-case for globally configured managed beans is for creating helper methods to be used in many applications. Instead of creating a base managed bean class that then is extended by all managed beans used in applications, you can deploy a managed bean in a JAR file and add the faces-config.xml file with the managed bean configuration to the JAR's META-INF folder as shown below.

Using a globally configured managed bean allows you to use Expression Language in the UI to access common functionality but also use Java in application specific managed beans. Storing the faces-config.xml file in the JAR file META-INF directory automatically makes it available when the JAR file is found in the class path of an application.