Question

I work in a very small shop (2 people), and since I started a few months back we have been relying on Windows Scheduled tasks. Finally, I’ve decided I’ve had enough grief with some of its inabilities such as

1. No logs that I can find except on a domain level (inaccessible to machine admins who aren’t domain admins)
2. No alerting mechanism (e-mail, for one) when the job fails.

Once again, we are a small shop. I’m looking to do the analogous scheduling system upgrade than I’m doing with source control (VSS –> Subversion). I’m looking for suggestions of systems that

1. Are able to do the two things outlined above
2. Have been community-tested. I’d love to be a guinae pig for exciting software, but job scheduling is not my day job.
3. Ability to remotely manage jobs a plus
4. Free a plus. Cheap is okay, but I have very little interest in going through a full blown sales pitch with 7 power point presentations.
5. Built-in ability to run common tasks besides .EXE’s a (minor) plus (run an assembly by name, run an Excel macro by name a plus, run a database stored procedure, etc.).

Answer 1

I think you can look at :

http://www.visualcron.com/