It is often necessary to have a system carry out operations without being directly connected to an end user. This is the case for periodic (time-based) activities, as well as operations that are triggered by a user operation, but for which the user does not wait. For example, an action is performed that promotes an object to a new life cycle state. The change to this life cycle state may trigger additional processing that is not directly related to the user's action. These activities should be carried out in the background.

The Windchill server manager is responsible for guaranteeing that background processing takes place. The implementation of processing queues and triggering mechanisms actually resides in the Windchill method servers. The server manager is simply responsible for keeping an instance of the method server running so that background processing can take place.

As described in Advanced Deployment, your environment can be configured such that there are multiple method servers, one of which is dedicated to running background processing queues.

For more information about queue configuration and maintenance, see About Background Queues.