Schedule timed jobs

Several features of Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services rely on scheduled background processes. For example, to be able to review usage analysis information, you must first gather the information, preferably when your site is not being heavily used. With Windows SharePoint Services, you can schedule the following operations to occur automatically at specific times.

Scheduled times apply to all Web sites on a particular Web server or in a particular content database, as indicated. The scope determines how the job is run. If a job is scoped to the Web server level, it is run for each Web server computer, independently of any other Web servers that might be hosting the same content. If an operation is scoped to the content database level, it is run once for the content database, which means once for the each content database in the entire server or server farm.

The Microsoft SharePoint Timer service, a background utility, handles scheduled jobs in Windows SharePoint Services. This utility is installed to your Web server when you set up Windows SharePoint Services. The SharePoint Timer service relies on the Gregorian calendar for scheduling. For every job you schedule, you must specify a beginning time for that job based on a 24-hour clock. You specify the time in local time versus an offset from Universal Coordinated Time (UCT), and the time is stored in that format as well.

The dates used by the SharePoint Timer service are not stored in context. This means that you cannot schedule jobs to run every X days/weeks/months/years, where X is greater than 1. So, while you can schedule jobs to run every day, every week, or every month, you cannot schedule a process for every two days, and so on. Neither can you schedule jobs for relative days in a month, such as the third Monday of every month.

When you schedule a timed job, you schedule the beginning time for the job. For example, you can schedule a job to be run daily, beginning between 1:00 AM and 2:00 AM. You always schedule jobs to begin within a time range, rather than at a specific time. This allows the SharePoint Timer service to be run at a random time in that range, so that not every server in a server farm is running the scheduled job at the same time. For example, if you set usage analysis processing to be done during the range 1:00 AM to 2:00 AM, then each front-end Web server starts processing usage analysis sometime between 1:00 and 2:00 AM.

You can schedule timed jobs by using the SharePoint Central Administration or Site Administration pages. To schedule a timed job, go to the page that contains the settings for the job you want to schedule, and then select the day, date, month, year, and time that you want the job performed.