Hello Travi,
Some answers to your questions today:
For your first question you are correct. The DEFAULT period is a 24 hours by 7 days period.
Second question what we recommend is link all the resources managed by schedule manager to the DEFAULT period.
The biggest misconception is that by the end of a period it causes all the resources DESIRED_STATE change to either UP or DOWN.
Well, this is not true. A new period must take over to set the DESIRED_STATE value.
As an example say you have a period of 08:00 through 17:00 for Mon through Fri and you link a CICS region to the period as UP.
The DESIRED_STATE of the resource will be set to UP at 8:00 on Mon through Fri but will not be set to DOWN at 17:01.
You must link the CICS region to the DEFAULT period as DOWN to stop the resource when it’s ‘UP’ period ends.
In theory you could also create a DOWN period for all the other hours in the week and link the CICS region to it a DOWN.
Using the DEFAULT period is much easier.
The answer to your last question is load a dummy schedule with no links in order to remove an active schedule.
Hope this all helps and feel free to update this discussion in case you have more questions Travi.
Regards, Cesar