1.  Introduction

 

 

Most mainframe computers run 24 hours a day, but most people work from 9 to 5.  Batch jobs that require lots of memory or the exclusive use of commonly shared resources can slow the system and keep people from finishing a day's work.

 

Some sites squeeze through this bottleneck by staggering hours or setting up shifts.  Apart from the added expense of maintaining a facility 24 hours a day, shift work often separates people who need close communication.

 

Other sites buy expensive production schedulers and discover that they have to create Scheduling Departments and hire scheduling specialists to run the system.  This complex and costly solution centralizes scheduling, and usually engenders new procedures and paperwork, which opens the door to errors.

 

The problems are easy to define:  there are jobs that have to run when few people are using the system;  there are jobs that have to run when you're not there to submit them;  there are jobs that run only after other jobs are done.

 

The solution is the Personal Job Scheduler (PJS®).  PJS decentralizes scheduling, and gives you complete control over job scheduling. It enables you to submit jobs on any day, at any time, under any circumstances.

 

This manual introduces PJS concepts and use in the following chapters:

 

Chapter 2        PJS System Overview introduces PJS concepts and provides a brief description of how PJS works.

 

Chapter 3        PJS Specification Conventions describes how to specify some PJS entities under TSO and ISPF.

 

Chapter 4        PJS/TSO Commands describes how to approach and use the set of PJS commands under TSO.  If you plan to use PJS under ISPF, you can skip this chapter.

 

Chapter 5        PJS/ISPF Interface describes how to use PJS on the set of distributed ISPF panels.

 

Chapter 6        Examples describes how to use PJS commands and features.  Although this chapter uses PJS/TSO commands for each example, all of the actions can be replicated in PJS/ISPF.