Can you expand on why running under cron is tedious? Do you mean entering 500 entries into cron is tedious? I'm not sure about Windows cron but this stuff is pretty simple and straight forward for *nix cron. There are commercial cron-like systems out there (autosys comes to mind) but I wouldn't go there unless your workflow is really complicated (need to kick off job Z if job A or B or C fails, etc).