Microsoft Windows Task Scheduler is used to create basic tasks. Much like UNIX cron or Z-Cron, Task Scheduler is a point solution designed for simplistic use cases, such as nightly batch files or time tracking for a small business. To coordinate tasks between Windows and non-Windows applications, you'll need custom PowerShell scripts or integrations.

Similarly, freeware solutions are not designed for enterprise-level scheduling and lack modern capabilities like event-driven automation.

Unlike most task management software, ActiveBatch allows you to run workloads on any operating system, including Windows 10, Mac OS, Linux, UNIX, OpenVMS and more, so you can coordinate tasks across your organization from a single control panel.

Automatically trigger jobs with business or IT events to reduce delays, minimize slack time and improve SLAs. 

ActiveBatch supports various event types, including:

• Emails
• Execution machine reboots
• FTP file event triggers
• Microsoft Message Queue
• Oracle Database triggers
• Social media feeds
• System startup
• VMware events
• Web Services
• Windows startups
• WMI Events

Task Scheduler jobs can be triggered by jobs from other scheduling software or task managers in non-Windows environments without any custom scripts or manual keypresses.

With ActiveBatch, you can choose from a range of scheduling options, including custom calendars, fiscal calendars, multiple time zones, custom tags and more. Engage constraint-based scheduling (CBS) to ensure new tasks don’t run until requisite conditions are met.

An automation tool like ActiveBatch can tackle business challenges, support milestones and solve problems no traditional job scheduler can touch, like:

• Driving effective IT change management by syncing objects across test, QA and production environments.
• Maintaining high availability with dynamic or manual no-cluster failover to combat the threat of outages and enforce job prioritization.
• Optimizing cloud provisioning with automation to help you achieve intelligent resource management.
• Promoting efficiency and consistency by executing the same job or plan for different workflows using reusable job templates and variables.

Switching to ActiveBatch delivers priceless benefits:

• Cross-platform integration gives you centralized automation across diverse systems for seamless workflow coordination.
• Pre-built job steps and templates facilitate rapid development of complex automated workflows.
• Real-time monitoring, comprehensive alert mechanisms and SLA management key features deliver operational efficiency far beyond what a simple job scheduler can provide.
• Non-cluster failover supports high availability to ensure continuous operation and minimal downtime.

ActiveBatch's Integrated Jobs Library provides pre-built, universal connectors. With dozens of extensions for popular applications like SAP and Informatica, your team members can easily automate and execute task runs from a central coordination point.

Integrate automated tasks from virtually any application or system using the low-code REST API and create drag-and-drop objects to reuse.

This extensibility facilitates the rapid creation of scheduled tasks and subtasks and the development of reliable, end-to-end workflows.