I have setup a production server and a staging server. Whenever we are at the point in our release cycle where we want to begin testing on staging I want to copy the production DB over to our staging server. I have setup snapshot replication to do this and have setup the staging server to have a pull subscription to the production DB.

I want my continuous integration server to be able to kick off this process. How do I programmatically trigger a snapshot to be created and replicated?

If there is a way to trigger this process is there a way to know when it's finished?