It's a common practice to set up some kind of automated build schedule - whether as a means to facilitate continuous integration, or just to postpone a lengthy/demanding build process. However, it can also be very useful to schedule a deployment.

Why Schedule a Deployment?

While build schedules are often recurring - weekly, daily, SCM-triggered, for example - a recurring deployment would not be useful, since a build must be promoted in order to be deployed to a new environment. However, perhaps your deployment process results in a temporary outage for a site and you would like this to occur only in off-peak hours; in this situation, it would be useful to promote a build, but delay deploying it to, say 3:00 AM.

In BuildMaster, scheduling a promotion is easy. Just click the Promote Build button on the Build Status page as usual (in this example, we are scheduling a deployment to the Release environment).

On the Promote Build dialog, just select the Execute On radio button and provide a date and time for the promotion; in this case we will chose 3:00 AM on the next day. Once configured, just click Promote Build, and the build is promoted to Release. Despite being promoted, however, the deployment execution will not begin until the selected time.