Schedule Activity: First Business Day of the Month

Maybe this is more straightforward than I originally thought it was....sometimes I tend to over think and complicate things than they actually are.  So just in case someone else finds this helpful.... :)

I recently got a request for a workflow to run on the 1st calendar day of the month or first business day if the 1st fell on a weekend.  I first though that it wasn't possible to do with the native scheduling and PowerShell was needed.  After I wrote up a Posh script to do the heavy lifting, it dawned on me how to use the native schedule activity.  It's not as straight forward as using the script, but does work.

Orchestrator's built-in schedule activity supports two options:
1)  Specifying the calendar day(s) of the month to run

2)  Specifying the week day to run

Here is the "main" runbook for the schedule that will invoke the rest of the workflow.  It requires four different schedule activities to accomplish the logic.  Each of the following links (green) have the logic "confirms to schedule equal to true".

Here is the PowerShell script to accomplish the same schedule result.  The "$Success" variable would be in the Published Data to use in the link logic to continue or not if Success equals true.

$DayOfWeek = [DateTime]::Now.DayOfWeek
$DayOfMonth = [DateTime]::Now.Day

If (  (($dayOfMonth -eq 1) -and ($dayOfWeek -ge [DayOfWeek]::Monday) -and ($dayOfWeek -le [DayOfWeek]::Friday)) -or ((($dayOfMonth -eq 2) -or ($dayOfMonth -eq 3)) -and ($dayOfWeek -eq [DayOfWeek]::Monday))  )
{
    $Success = $true   
}
Else {
    $Success = $false
}

Orchestrator 2012 - Daylight Savings Time Scheduling Issue

I'm running a little behind on this post as Daylight Savings Time here in the US was back on Sunday, November 4.  For ease of example, all dates/times will reference the schedule for Daylight Savings in the United States.

There is an issue with scheduling Runbooks that start with the Monitor Date/Time activity during DST.

Daylight Saving Time (United States) 2012 began at 2:00 AM on Sunday, March 11.  At this time, 
the clocks would be moved ahead one hour to 3:00 AM.

• This means any Runbooks scheduled to run between the hours of  2:00 AM - 3:00 AM would be skipped entirely.

Daylight Saving Time (United States) 2012 ended at 2:00 AM on Sunday, November 4.  At this time, 
the clocks would be moved back one hour to 1:00 AM.

• This means any Runbooks schedule to run between the hours of 1:00 AM - 2:00 AM would run twice.

Depending on what the runbooks are executing, this could cause major issues and/or unscheduled downtime. It would also suggest Runbooks that are not set on an hourly interval (i.e. once daily) be scheduled outside of the hours of 1:00 AM - 3:00 AM to avoid any interruptions.  Unless you throw an exception into the schedule to work around the timing that the clocks are changed.