Automating Tasks

Automating tasks is a great thing, especially if it helps to lighten your already heavy administrative load. Using scripting, you can automate tasks and schedule them to run. Exchange 2000 already has a number of automated tasks that occur nightly. The most resource-intensive of these tasks occur at night, but there are some that may also occur throughout the day if you are not careful about when you schedule them to run. If you are managing servers that handle many users on a "non-traditional" business day, such as servers that support 24-hour operations or users in many different time zones, then knowledge of these tasks is vital. Some of the automated tasks include information store maintenance, rebuilding offline address books (OABs), and performing full-text index­ing. You can write your own automated tasks to run reports, import message tracking logs, or manage user accounts and mailboxes.

Exchange 2000 and Windows 2000 also provide developers with many opportunities for automating tasks using scripts and Exchange 2000 event sinks. Knowledge of these features can help you to further automate the operation of your Exchange servers, develop workflow applications, or optimize performance of your servers. This chapter includes discussions of the following:

• Regularly scheduled maintenance
• Exchange 2000 event sinks
• Scripting and Exchange 2000
• The Microsoft Exchange Event Services
• Client automation

No one wants to repeat the same task over and over again. Excel gurus especially hate the drudgery of repetitious work like data entry and formatting cell after cell after cell. Fortunately, Excel offers a serious time-saving tool called macros—min­iature programs that automatically perform a series of steps within any workbook. Excel macros are written in a full-blown programming language called VBA (short for Visual Basic for Applications). VBA is a scaled-down version of the incredibly popular Visual Basic programming language, and it's fined-tuned for Excel and other Office applications. Fortunately, you don't need to be a programmer to use VBA. In fact, you can create a simple macro using a special Excel tool called the macro recorder. The macro recorder works like a tape recorder, but instead of recording audio, it records keystrokes and mouse actions as you perform them.

Questionnaire:

• Explain about the automating tasks.