Thursday, August 23, 2007

MOSS scheduled jobs may run late or not at all

A known bug has been uncovered in the Sharepoint 2007 environment concerning the execution of scheduled jobs, as described in article KB932563.

In short it comes down to the fact that one-time scheduled jobs can be delayed up to 2 hours, concerning the configured time zone of the MOSS server.
It is probably so that the OWSTimer.exe always assumes the server is configured with the PST time zone.

The problem should be solved in the upcoming SP1 for MOSS, but until then there are several workarounds possible:
1. Schedule the tasks to start one hour earlier.
2. Change the time zone on the servers that are running SharePoint Server 2007 to a similar time zone that does not use DST.
3. Or (my favorite) create a short batch file that forces the jobs to run immediately.

To do so, open notepad and type the following

cd C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN
cls
echo Execute jobs...
stsadm.exe -o execadmsvcjobs


Safe it as a .bat file and launch it whenever you need it.

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