Third party scheduling and emailing - 1

Of the many missing "features" of Discoverer is the ability to schedule and email reports. As many of you are are, scheduling can be done using one of a multitude of third-party scheduling tools. The one that I like is the native scheduler that comes with Windows XP.

Coupled with Discoverer Desktop's command-line interface it has always been possible to schedule the execution of a Discoverer workbook and export the output in a selected format, to a named file in a named folder. The difficulty has been in the emailing of that report. While there are a myriad of ways to email something, one of the simplest involves a product called Febooti. I discovered, pardon the pun, this product a few days ago and purchased a commercial license straight away. Now I can honestly say that all of my emailing problems have gone away and I can finally put this issue to bed.

With febooti Command line e-mail you can:

• Send email from the dos prompt to any number of recipients.
• Send attached files, text or HTML with embedded pictures.
• Send email using CC and / or BCC (Blind Carbon Copy).
• SMTP authentication (PLAIN, LOGIN, NTLM, CRAM-MD5).
• Secure connections by using -SSL and -STARTTLS.
• Set SMTP server address and SMTP server port.

Advanced features:

• Create batch files to send email from any* program.
• Easy-to-use command line switches with alias support.
• Unlimited TO, CC and BCC number of recipients.
• Take parameters from external text file or files.
• e-update - checks for updates automatically.

I will be posting more information on this subject, including example scripts and a white paper during the coming weeks. For more information see my website (link).