{"id":2424,"date":"2013-12-14T00:01:00","date_gmt":"2013-12-14T00:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.technet.microsoft.com\/heyscriptingguy\/2013\/12\/14\/working-with-task-scheduler-xml\/"},"modified":"2013-12-14T00:01:00","modified_gmt":"2013-12-14T00:01:00","slug":"working-with-task-scheduler-xml","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/working-with-task-scheduler-xml\/","title":{"rendered":"Working with Task Scheduler XML"},"content":{"rendered":"

Summary<\/strong>: Guest blogger, Jason Morgan, talks about using XML to work with the Task Scheduler.<\/p>\n

Microsoft Scripting Guy, Ed Wilson, is here. Today I am proud to introduce Jason Morgan as the newest guest blogger for the Hey, Scripting Guy! Blog. I ran across Jason at the first meeting of the Northern Virginia (NOVA) PowerShell User Group meeting. The Scripting Wife and I were hanging out, and I asked him if he would like to contribute. Today’s excellent post is the result of that collaboration. First, a little bit about Jason…<\/p>\n

\"Photo<\/a><\/p>\n

Jason Morgan has been working in IT since 2004. He is an engineer for Verizon Enterprise Services and he works in their Integrated Solutions organization, providing fully managed infrastructure and application support services for hosted and customer premise solutions. He is a founding member of the NOVA PowerShell User Group.<\/p>\n

Blog: Jason’s PowerShell Blog<\/a>
Twitter: @RJasonMorgan<\/p>\n

Thank you for the opportunity to contribute to the Hey, Scripting Guy! Blog. I’m here today to talk about working with XML, specifically working with XML as it relates to the Task Scheduler. I’ve found at my job that I often need to create the same tasks on multiple computers. Unfortunately, the raw functionality that comes with schtasks.exe is a little limited. For example, you can create a 2003- or 2008-level task, but you can’t create a 2008 R2 task, which in the XML, is v1.2. Luckily, schtasks<\/strong> and the Task Scheduler COM objects are able to create tasks directly from XML.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, using XML is an easy and flexible way to create tasks and deploy them throughout your environment. It gives you extremely granular control of a task. After you try it, you’ll find it’s nearly as easy as using the GUI—and it’s a heck of a lot faster.<\/p>\n

For those of you who aren’t familiar with working with XML in Windows PowerShell, there are a ton of great articles and blogs that cover the subject. In this post, I’m going to largely skip the fundamentals and get right in to how to work with XML for scheduled tasks. For background information, I recommend the following posts:<\/p>\n