One of the most frustrating things in Sharepoint for developers or even administrators, is implementing a new change and then nothing seems to happen. This is caused by the fact that Sharepoint implements almost all changes as jobs that run behind the scenes.

The only way to speed things up is to firstly understand what jobs are available and then finding a way to change the schedule or execute the job immediately. Unfortunately there is no way to to this in the admin console by default and therefore you will have to use the command line tool "stsadm" to do his.

In this blog I will first outline the default jobs that exist, show where you can find this information using the "Sharepoint Admin Console" and then run a command to change the job schedule.

Default timer jobs

Default timer jobs for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

The following table lists the default timer jobs created for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.

Default timer jobs for Office SharePoint Server 2007

The following table lists the default timer jobs created for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Timer jobs for Office SharePoint Server 2007 with Project Server 2007

The following table lists the timer jobs that are available for Office SharePoint Server 2007 only, if Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 is installed in the farm.

Shared Services Provider timer jobs

Shared Services Provider (SSP) timer jobs are timer jobs that are created by default whenever an SSP is created. By default, SSP timer jobs are disabled, and they have to be enabled. These timer jobs are scheduled to run daily, weekly, or at any particular time.

Default SSP timer jobs

The following table contains the default timer jobs for any SSP created.

SSP timer jobs for Office SharePoint Server 2007 with Project Server 2007

The following table lists the SSP timer jobs for Office SharePoint Server 2007 only, if Office Project Server 2007 is installed in the farm.

Viewing the Jobs using the admin Console

All the above mentioned jobs can be viewed using the "Admin web site for Sharepoint". Open up the site and navigate to the operations tab.

On this tab you will find a section called "Global Configuration". There are two options here relating to jobs. The first one is called "Job Definitions" to show you a list of the jobs used by Sharepoint.

The second option is used to view the "Status" of each of these jobs.

Unfortunately none of these two screens allow you to change anything significant about the jobs except the description. You can also disable the job using this screen. The only way to change anything as far as scheduling goes is to use the command line.

You can also view all the jobs from the command line by enumerating through the collection:

stsadm -o enumssptimerjobs -title "sspname"

Changing the Job Schedules

The "stsadm" Administrators command-line application can be used to control certain Timed Jobs functionality. Unfortunately, there are no default commands to install or start/stop Timed Jobs, but there is a command to run all Jobs immediately and commands to reschedule a number of Jobs.

stsadm -o execadmsvcjobs

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 3:00 AM and 5:00 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 3:00 and 5:00 AM.

There are also SharePoint components that use a Timed Job and can be controlled using the command-line tool. For example, the commands "setpolicyschedule", "setcontentdeploymentjobschedule", and "setsitedirectoryscanschedule" are components that support the Timed Job infrastructure. Each of the commands accepts a "-schedule" parameter (named "recurrence string" or "schedule" in the help function of stsadm) that is a free string of the form:

"[Time frame] [Interval] between [value] and [value]"

For example:

"every 10 minutes between 0 and 59"
"hourly between 0 and 59"
"daily at 21:00:00"
"weekly between Mon 02:00 and Fri 21:00:00"
"yearly at Dec 31 22:00:00"

The syntax looks like this:

stsadm -o setcontentdeploymentjobschedule -schedule "daily at 21:00:00"

Referenced Blogs:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc678870(TechNet.10).aspx

http://www.codeguru.com/cpp/misc/misc/microsoftofficeoutlook/print.php/c14133