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The answer to the question is that ever popular and very definite..."It depends".

Is the automation that you want to accomplish sending a file every Monday morning at 5:00 am;,daily at noon, or when an expected file arrives in a specific directory?

If you want a file to be delivered every Monday morning at 5:00 am the option is handled completely within Connect:Direct.  When you create your process there are options on the Process Properties window.  Select the Control tab:

To set a process to run every Monday at 5:00 am first select the "Day" radio button in the "Start Date" area then from the drop box select Monday.  Next select the "Time" radio button in the "Start Time" area and set ti to 5:00 am. This will set the day and time when the process will run.  In the "Execution Options" area, set the "Hold" field to either no or leave it blank.  The "Retain" field has to be set to yes.  You can now save the process.

When you submit the process, it will go into the Hold queue until the following Monday at 5:00 am when it will be executed.  After execution the process will go back into the TCQ (Transmission Control Queue) until the following Monday when it will again be executed at 5:00 am.

If you open the Process Monitor and monitor all processes you will see the date/time the process was submitted, you will also see the date/time that the process is next scheduled to run.

Hint:  If you have several scheduled processes, this would be a good time to start building a Work List.  In your Requester you will see an item called "New Work List" you can use this to build a work list containing all of your scheduled processes.  Once you have the work list built you can execute the work list to re-submit all of your scheduled processes should the need arise.  There might be a time when you will have to rebuild the TCQ, this process will delete your existing processes from the TCQ and they will no longer automatically execute, when this happens just execute your work list and all of your automated processes will be submitted again without you needing to find all of the processes and re-submitting them one at a time.

For the second scenario you need to create a process and on the “Control” tab select “Daily” in the “Start Date” “Day” drop box.  You would then select the time 12:00:00 PM then save the process.  When submitted it will be scheduled to run every day at noon.

For the third scenario your process would be created with both the Hold and Retain fields set to either blank or no.  In other words just your standard manually submitted process.  For automation in this scenario you will not use the Connect:Direct scheduler.  You will need to download and install the Connect:Direct File Agent.  You will then configure the File Agent to watch the directory where the file will be located, for example add C:\WorkDirectory to the “Watched directories” field.  Note that this field can contain multiple watch directories.  Next you would create a Submit Process rule by defining criteria to match the file name then point the rule to the process you want executed when the file arrives.  If you create your process to use variables you can use the same process for across several rules by passing values for the variables into the process using the “Process argument’s field.  By default the File Agent will scan the watch directories every one minute so by default the file would be processed within one minute of arrival into the directory.