Schedules - mark severals schedules at once as retire/unretire

[EwaJ]

Hi,

I'm working on BluePrism 6.10.5.
I'm wondering it you could reconsider my new idea of un/retiring schedules in Control Room.
Today, we need to one by one un/retire schedules. In case we need to perform  this action of many schedules it is frustrating, especially, that the list is changing the view, after each action of un/retire (the list is going to the end of un/retire schedules. And we need to look for the schedules again.

BR,
Ewa

[chris.strong]

Hello @Ewa Jesionowska 

I understand the ask to enable multiple Schedules to be retired / unretired at once.

Could you share why you need to retire / unretire numerous Schedules at the same time? 

I.e. What does this allow you to do?  Is it something done regularly or you were solving an immediate problem.

Kind regards

Chris Strong

SS&C Blue Prism Product Manager

[EwaJ]

HI Chris Strong,

thank you for reviewing my idea. This is rather ad hoc activity, but still when there is ten or more schedules to be retire/unretire it is a bit frustrating:) I usually used it when we had a migration to the new version of BP.

[PawełImiołek]

Hello Ewa. I support your idea. Here the same problem. On our project we use many schedules, and to retire active ones / unretire templates, we have to make the same thing multiple times. Maybe it would be good to have this setting configurable - whether Blue Prism should scroll or not when schedule jumps to the other section.

[chris.strong]

Thank you @Ewa Jesionowska 

You’ve given us everything I asked, and I understand the request so I’ve set the Idea Status to Reviewed.  I’ve added a couple of questions for the wider community to comment on too.

Questions for the community:

1. Do you use retire to simply stop the automated starting trigger (schedule time) or is it because the schedule definition is no longer needed?
2. Could you share why you need to retire / unretire numerous Schedules at the same time? 

Kind regards

Chris Strong

Senior Product Manager

SS&C | Blue Prism

[RyanSchofield]

Hi Chris,

This is a frustrating usability issue for our clients too.

To answer your questions.

1. We retire for numerous reasons but never because the schedule is no longer needed. In that case we would simply delete it. We have set days a month where particular processes must take priority over others, and so we must retire all schedules and run the process on all machines. With 40+ schedules, this is very tedious and time consuming. As Ewa mentioned, each time you retire a schedule, the view forces you to the retired section of the tree view, meaning you have to scroll back up to find your place. Repeat that 40 times. And then later 40 times again to unretire them.
2. As mentioned above, schedules are retired for many reasons - but ultimately due to changing priorities against the previously defined schedules. Perhaps a process is identified as faulty, or a robot has an issue that needs to be resolved, or all processes must be stopped due to allow an emergency running of another, to clear down a backlog.

Thanks,

Ryan

[Richard.Anter]

This would also be helpful when doing upgrades, because, as the documentation states, you have to retire all schedules so they don't run during the upgrade process.