Owner's Manual

Managing Jobs and Tasks 67
7
Managing Jobs and Tasks
A task is an action that you want to perform on a system.
The Dell™ Management Console enables you to perform tasks, such as,
configuring the hardware or power reset a target device. Based on where
you want to execute a task, these tasks are categorized as:
• Client Tasks — The client tasks are executed on remote computers through
a Task Server. Client tasks always involve a communication between the
server and a set of clients. For example, Altiris™ power control tasks.
• Task Server Tasks — A Task Server task can be run on the Symantec™
Management Console or on a system that has a Task Server installed. All
the remote Task Servers should be registered with the
Symantec
Management Console
. For example, command line builder tasks.
The Task Server tasks are similar to client tasks, but can be run on an
unmanaged system (that is, a system that does not have the Altiris Agent
installed on it). For more information on Task Server, see the
Online Help
or Symantec documentation.
A Task Server allows you to reuse tasks in multiple jobs or to clone and
modify tasks as required.
• Server Tasks — The server tasks are executed on the Symantec
Management Console . A server task may also involve communicating
with a set of clients if the purpose of the task so requires. For example,
network discovery tasks.
A job is a task that runs two or more tasks in a specific sequence. A complex
scenario can have precondition checks to run under different situations by
having nested jobs within each other. See the Online Help for more
information on creating jobs.
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