Powershell script to report on all scheduled tasks in our domain

One of the annoying things about Windows management is that you cannot centrally manage scheduled tasks across your environment. You're either spending a lot of money on a third party system to do this for you, or your trying to script this.

I'll skip going into a rant about what I think of most of the available task management products out there (yes, package management and gui automation are nice, but I really just want to manage the native Windows Scheduled Tasks, not replace it). I had previously played with WINAT and command line scripts to utilize AT.EXE. Neither were sufficient as they both worked with the old-style NT4 tasks, which meant you couldn't see them via Scheduled Tasks nor could you run them under their own identities.

Windows 2000 introduced a method to query Scheduled Task info via WMI but there was no way to actually set the information.

By pure accident I found "schtasks.exe", the exact utility I'd been looking for. With SCHTASKS.EXE you can query, create, delete, start, stop, etc any scheduled task on any server you have administrative rights, both locally and remotely. Whats even nicer is SCHTASKS.EXE supports exporting query results in .CSV format.

Below is a script that will take a list of servers and generate a master CSV of all of their tasks info.

For more information on using SCHTASKS.EXE, just run "SCHTASKS.EXE /?" from the command line.

Pre-Requisites:

• Windows 2003 (not tested on 2000 or 2008)
• Powershell 1.0

What this script does:

1. Reads in values from a .config file for where to find a CSV file of server names, where to save the report, and what to use as its temp folder
2. Loops through the specified list of servers and calls SCHTASKS against it with the option to save a verbose .csv file of all task info
3. After each loop interation, reads the temporary .csv file into a CSV object of all prior iterations
4. After all servers are queried, it saves the final compiled report
   

Script files:

• QueryScheduledTasks_8.4.28.zip
  

Steps:

1. Download the code
2. Extract it wherever you like
3. Modify the .config file to update the values
4. Modify the servers.csv file to have the names of the servers to query
   

For reference, here is the script code:

$Version="v8.4.28 Aaron Dodd"
$Description="Generate CSV of scheduled tasks in the environment"

#------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Settings / Variables
#------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If (Test-Path "QueryScheduledTasks.config") {
$cfg=[xml](get-content "QueryScheduledTasks.config")
} Else {
Write-Host "!! ERROR !! - Config file not found"
Write-Host "A file with the same name as this script, ending in .config, must exist in the same directory as this script."
exit
}

$ServerList = Import-Csv $cfg.configuration.ServerList.name
$FinalReport=$cfg.configuration.FinalReport.name
$TempDir=$cfg.configuration.TempFolder.name
$TempReport=$TempDir + "\temp.csv"
$ErrorActionPreference=$cfg.configuration.ErrorAction.value
#------------------------------------------------------------------------------


#------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Process tasks
#------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ForEach ($Server in $ServerList) {
schtasks /QUERY /S $Server.Name /FO CSV /V > $TempReport
$TempCsv += Import-Csv $TempReport
}
Remove-Item $TempReport
$TempCsv | Export-Csv $FinalReport -notype
#------------------------------------------------------------------------------