Introduction

In today’s busy enterprise, individuals do not usually have the time or the availability to run routine tasks on a regular basis nor do most enterprises desire to have staff dedicated to running such tasks. As a result, there is a strong need to automate repetitive processes so that they can be run without any input from users. At the heart of automating these tasks are scheduling utilities.

With scheduling utilities, you can set up tasks to run automatically at specific times. Whether you need a task to run once at 9:00 p.m. that night, every Thursday night at 11:30 p.m., or every 5 minutes between the hours of 6:00 p.m. and 9:00 a.m., you can use scheduling utilities to create an automated solution to handle the situation.

Such automated solutions can include but are not limited to:

• Performing nightly software builds
• Running automated test suites on new software once a week
• Forwarding weekend and off-hours e-mail to your home e-mail address
• Backing up data on a weekly basis

This document guides you from the basics of scheduling in a Windows environment through configuring and using the PTC MKS Toolkit Scheduling Suite to examples of using those utilities in conjunction with other PTC MKS Toolkit and Windows utilities to create solutions such as those described above.

This document has the following chapters:

• Chapter 2: “Basics of Windows Scheduling” provides you with a basic overview of scheduling in a Windows environment including an overview of the Windows Task Scheduler and an introduction to the PTC MKS Toolkit Scheduling Suite.
• Chapter 3: “Using the PTC MKS Toolkit Scheduling Suite” shows you how to use the graphical PTC MKS Toolkit Scheduler as well as the PTC MKS Toolkit command-line scheduling utilities: at, batch, wts, and crontab.
• Chapter 4: “Solutions” provides examples of using the PTC MKS Toolkit Scheduling Suite in conjunction with other PTC MKS Toolkit and Windows utilities to create sample scheduling solutions.
• Chapter 5: “Troubleshooting” lists potential problems and their possible solutions that can arise when using the PTC MKS Toolkit Scheduling Suite.
• Appendix A: “Configuring the PTC MKS Toolkit Scheduling Suite” shows how to configure the PTC MKS Toolkit Scheduling Suite and related programs including instructions on installing the Windows Task Scheduler.
• Appendix B: “Importing UNIX crontab Files” describes how you can import crontab files created on UNIX systems to use with the PTC MKS Toolkit crontab utility.