Basic functional components – Activities and Policies

This section explains the terms used within ActivitySCHEDULER for the jobs that are scheduled.

The basic building block of a scheduled task is the command line to be executed. In ActivitySCHEDULER, this command line is defined in an activity, along with the various parameters for its execution, timing conditions, completion codes, dependencies, etc.

At the highest level, a group of jobs is scheduled to run at a particular time or times. In ActivitySCHEDULER, this is called a policy, and can contain multiple activities and activity (linked groups of activities).

The activities and activity sets within a policy can be linked in structured relationships, to run concurrently or consecutively, depending on completion codes. Activities within an activity set can also be linked in the same way. At each level, different dependencies and timing conditions can be imposed.

The activity and activity set definitions used within a policy can be re-used in different policies (or even in the same policy with different parameters), and are thus known as templates.

Principle user interfaces

The main interfaces provided with ActivitySCHEDULER are as follows:

The Policy Designer allows you design and re-use activities, activity and policies. It then allows to you enable policies so that they are available in the Policy Manager.

The Policy Manager allows you to schedule your enabled policies, or to start them on an ad hoc basis. You can also manage other aspects of your operational policies and view details of past runs.

A Web version of the Policy Manager is also available, offering the same management functionality, but with more remote flexibility.

The Policy Designer and Policy Manager (but not the web version) also provide ActivitySCHEDULER’s Configuration menu, allowing you to specify the users and computers to be used in the product. You can also restrict the permissions for each interactive user within ActivitySCHEDULER, define custom calendars and other advanced items.

To maintain security, passwords must be configured to logon to the above interfaces, and to run activities in a user context. All passwords are encrypted.

Related facilities

ActivitySCHEDULER also provides you with these additional utilities:

Report Wizard allows you to use ActivitySCHEDULER to automate your Crystal reports. A number of sample reports for the ActivitySCHEDULER database are also supplied.

WhiteBoard is a message broadcasting utility which is primarily supplied as a notification method to be used within your ActivitySCHEDULER policies, but can also be used for broadcasting messages between users and user groups, or from other applications (see ActivitySCHEDULER SDK).

A number of pre-defined skeleton policies are supplied with ActivitySCHEDULER. Before you can use them, these must be customised for your own system using the Policy Wizard – this allows you to specify which computer and user-context to use, who to send notifications to, etc.

Some of the supplied policies perform various housekeeping tasks related to the ActivitySCHEDULER product. Others are used to demonstrate different tasks that can be automated using ActivitySCHEDULER (for example a database backup).

Once processed by the Policy Wizard, the policies are available in the Policy Manager for scheduling. You can also use them as a starting point for your own policies by editing them within the Policy Designer.

System Architecture

The main ActivitySCHEDULER product is installed on a Central Server, which can be anything from Windows XP Pro upwards. A number of Windows services are installed on this machine.

If the web interface is required, the Web Server can optionally be separate from the Central Server, with an intervening firewall if necessary.

ActivitySCHEDULER also uses a small database (accessed via ODBC) which can be either MS SQL Server (recommended) or Oracle. Access is also supported but is usually recommended for evaluation only or for the Lite edition.

The user interfaces do not access the database directly but via a service on the Central Server. The exception is the Report Wizard, which requires an ODBC connection to the database being reported on, if the report is being previewed or generated directly.

Additional Windows services are installed on any machines where activities are to be executed. The user interfaces (see above) can be installed on any Windows machine(s) in the network.

The Web version of the Policy Manager does not require any additional installation on your PC once you have installed and configured your Web Server – you just need a browser.

The diagram below shows the basic configuration of the various components that make up the ActivitySCHEDULER product:

The diagram above shows only the minimum configuration requirements for ActivitySCHEDULER. Different components can of course be combined on a single server or workstation.