The commissioning of the PETRA III storage ring at DESY in Hamburg is now in progress, and in 2010 it will begin user operation as a high brilliance storage-ring-based X-ray source. PETRA III is based on an extensive remodeling and upgrade of the PETRA II storage ring, which was used as a preaccelerator for the HERA collider. The upgrade has also included control room applications, most of which are written now in Java. The large number of applications used to control various machine states and to perform the many diagnostic tasks has motivated us to create a console application management system, which combines applications into task-specific groups, automates the starting and stopping of the grouped applications, and re-applies recently set screen attributes of the applications, preserving the operators' preferences. In this paper we describe the Console Application Manager, a JMX-based (Java Management Extension) implementation of such a system, with additional support for non-Java applications