We set out last week to look at a server-automation package before we got distracted by a cool remote-control tool. But now we're back and ready to explore ActiveBatch from Advanced Systems Concepts.

Over the last few months we've reviewed several automation products, but ActiveBatch is different. First, it only runs jobs - batch files or executables; it doesn't provide generalized programmatic building blocks, as others do. Second, it can execute jobs on Windows, Linux, Unix and OpenVMS. Third, it can coordinate jobs across platforms.

Under ActiveBatch, jobs can be as simple or as complicated as required. They can be chained together, with the success or failure of the individual jobs determining the success or failure of the chain.

You can schedule jobs by date and time, system events and application events. They also can be defined for execution on a specific machine or class of machines, exe-cuted on a virtual machine that is based on workload or other criteria, and complete audit trails of the submitted job, including a log of the output of the job, can be created. Finally, you can define alerts and notifications to monitor and report on job status.

The documentation - a 435-page PDF - is excellent.

ActiveBatch has three components - clients, job schedulers and execution engines. The clients run only under Windows and provide the user interface to manage the job schedulers, which also run only under Windows. The job schedulers, in turn, drive the execution engines, which run on all versions of Windows .Net; OpenVMS Version 7.1 or later; Compaq Tru64 Version 4 or later; Sun Solaris (SPARC) Version 6 or later; HP-UX Version 11 or later; and IBM-AIX Version 4.3 or later.

The job schedulers, which run as Windows system services, keep track of all jobs, and determine when and where a job has to execute. Underlying the job schedulers is a database. You can use Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle or other databases compliant with Open Database Connectivity. If you don't have a suitable database installed, Advanced Systems Concepts can provide you with Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine for no additional licensing fee.

The client can be a GUI application or a command-line interface. Also, ActiveBatch is based on Microsoft's Component Object Model, so object-oriented scripting languages can directly access ActiveBatch's objects, properties and methods. There also is a Microsoft Management Console snap-in for managing security policies that apply to every aspect of running jobs.