Robot/SCHEDULE Handles A Prickly Situation

During the week of March 8, I visited with Robot customers in Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. It was great week of working with people from so many industries: insurance, financial, retail, manufacturing, government, entertainment, and consulting. Who says the IBM i world is not varied and vibrant?

One of the topics for the week was ad hoc scheduling. That’s an important topic for many customers because it can address a potentially prickly problem: Without programming, how do you prevent end users from submitting processes that can greatly impact daily processing and should be run after hours?

It’s easy with Robot/SCHEDULE. Robot/SCHEDULE has a feature called Submit Delay (SD) job. SD jobs have a schedule, but they don’t run. Their sole purpose is to capture end user jobs and delay them. You can schedule SD jobs to run with any schedule. You can even set them up with no schedule, so they track end user jobs through Robot/SCHEDULE. These SD jobs capture end user jobs and delay them based on the SD job's schedule (for example, run user job A at 23:00; or run user job B tonight after backups complete).

The selection criteria are based on IBM i job name, command name, or user name, and you specify by using Robot/SCHEDULE’s Exception Scheduling tab. An easy way to practice delaying jobs is to create an SD job, prompt the SBMJOB command from a command line, and submit the process to batch. You’ll see the effects quickly.

Speaking of handling prickly situations, I did a little sightseeing in the desert and wanted to share this picture of me and my cactus friend—I’m amazed how big and isolated these plants are. Happy ad hoc scheduling.