Practical Alternative for Windows Scheduled Tasks (small shop)

Question

Greetings,

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.).

Thanks in advance, Alan.

Answer 1

Consider Cygwin and its version of "cron". It meets requirements #1 thru 4 (though without a nice UI for #3.)

Answer 2

If you're looking for a free tool there is plenty of implementations for the popular Cron tool for Windows, for example CRONw. It's pretty easy to configure and maintain. You could easily write add custom WSH scripts to send your emails and add log entries.

If you're going commercial way BMC Control-M is arguably one of the best but I don't believe that it is particularly cheap.

You may also consider some upcoming packages like JobScheduler

Answer 3

I think you can look at :

http://www.visualcron.com/