Any modern job scheduler can help you get your batch scheduling done. What differientiates ESP from the other MVS centric schedulers that I have had acquaintance with are calendar management, scheduling vocabulary, the ability to expand capabilities with REXX, non proprietary security with RACF, and good performance (low CPU requirements). I will explain briefly below.
ESP calendar management of special days and holidays in individual calendars is not unique but is a better implementaion than any other I have seen.
ESP's rich scheduling vocabulary (workdays, weekdays, weekends, tomorrow, today, yearly, hourly,,, etceteras) is unmatched. It makes it easier for your schedulers and end users to actually schedule their workload using English language terms they are already familiar with.
ESP's use of REXX as a means to expand the capabilities of the base language CLANG makes it possible to do things that you would not have thought even possible. It allows you to dynamically build job networks on the fly. For instance we have an application that periodically backs up disk packs and this is done with one job per disk pack. As we are always adding disk packs we don't want to continually change the application to account for the newly added disk packs so we use REXX to read a file that contains all the disk packs and build an application to back up all the packs that it finds in the file. You want to add or delete an disk pack from the backup process then you simply add or remove a record in the flat file.
Another innovative use of REXX is to add features into ESP that it does not currently have. We once acquired a small company that had a MVS job scheduler (I think it was called ASF) that had the capability to schedule events based on the existence or nonexistence of an MVS dataset. ESP can schedule events based on the existence of distributed datasets with the FILE_TRIGGER workload object but its DSTRIG workload object for MVS files does not have this capability. I was able to replicate this capability of ASF inside ESP with REXX which made the conversion from ASF to ESP go much smoother than it would have otherwise.
To my mind the ability of ESP to utilize REXX to enable the end user to introduce additional capabilities into the product is the standout feature that differientiates ESP from any other scheduler I have come across.
ESP uses RACF to manage the scheduling entities (appls, events, calendars, tracking models,,,etceteras) which means you do not have to utilize a vendors proprietary internal scheduling security with the product to protect your schedules. This presumes you are comfortable using RACF. Also ESP has your batch workload run with the userid of a end user rather than the userid of the scheduling software so you don't have to use SURROGAT.
ESP is also very CPU efficient. It scales well, it will run on 25 MIPS or a 6000 MIPS machine and it will use less than 1% of CPU. Hence you will not have to do any CPU performance tuning for ESP.
To reiterate I believe the things that makes ESP most unique from other schedulers is its ability to utilize REXX to expand its feature set and its use of RACF to allow you to dispense with the use of SURROGAT.
Regards
Michael E. Ellis
Systems Programmer
Deere & Company