4. The method of claim 1 , wherein the task of the computing system comprises one or more of the following: a disaster recovery task, a performance analysis task, a task for determining what disk capacity is needed to deploy a unified-messaging environment, a mail-flow analyzing task, a task for determining if a mail program is properly installed on a client computing device, a task for determining why memory usage is relatively high for a computing device, and a troubleshooting task.
1. A computer executable method of a step engine for automating execution of a task of a computing system, said task including a plurality of steps, said method comprising: retrieving an available update of an input file; receiving the input file defining a task to be executed; parsing the task in the received input file into a plurality of steps of the task; defining a set of configuration files from the received input file, each of said configuration files specifying at least one action and data relating to the computing system, said at least one action being defined by one of the parsed plurality of steps of the task; dispatching at least one of the configuration files to a data engine for executing the action specified by the dispatched configuration file, wherein dispatching the at least one of the configuration files includes dispatching a driver to the data engine, said driver being associated with the action specified by the dispatched configuration file; dispatching the data engine to gather the data specified by the configuration files; receiving an output file from the data engine, said output file representing a result of the data engine executing the action specified by the dispatched configuration file; generating a log file in response to receiving the output file, said log file representing the action and the result of executing the action; updating the log file as the data engine executes each of the configuration files and provides the output file; and generating a next configuration file specifying at least one more action of a step of the task as a function of the received output file and the input file and dispatching the next configuration file to the data engine.