DST 2007 (Updated 26/09/07)
Saturday 22 September 2007 at 08:21 am. Used tags: 2007, dstEveryone in IT already knows this but Daylight Savings is changing for a bunch of different regions this year. In New Zealand its kicking in a week early so be prepared. As per the quote: Daylight-saving ‘pain’ on the way, says Microsoft.
We’ve pushed out timezone updates via WSUS to desktops and servers and manually patched Windows 2000 (no official patch from Microsoft unless you pay them maintenance).
Also due to the strange way Outlook handles appointments you’ll need to either run an Exchange based tool to individually shift appointments (which I hear is pretty flakey) or run the same tool as part of the login script for every individual (which seems to work but is clunky).
We’ve also had to patch Solaris & Java apps, re-sync our Cisco switch times (which were all out of sync anyway), patch our firewall, SAN, DMZ hosts and start an awareness campaign to ensure people are aware of some of the issues that might occur during the first week of October (remember EA’s and PA’s are your friends so make sure they have a handle on their managers schedules!).
Luckily all the issues will be ‘nuisance’ value only – appointments and room bookings might be out by an hour should be the limit of anyones problems. From an IT perspective log-files and time-stamps might be out by an hour. Of course ‘nuisance’ is a sliding scale the further up the food chain you go – if I miss an appointment no one cares; if the CEO misses an appointment it could be a serious problem!
Update – we’re seeing three things –
- Appointments have shifted an hour for the week between the 1st and 5th – opening them shows the correct time but in a day or multi-day view they’re an hour out.
- TZMove doesn’t appear to shift appointments consistantly.
- Individual resource bookings seem to book a resource an hour ahead but block out the actual time to prevent double-booking.
- Recurring meetings with resource bookings book the actual time leading to conflicts with the above individual resource booking scenario. Nice.
We’re secretly hoping Microsoft is smarter than we think and come 1.59am on Sept 30th Exchange will correct these anomolies. We might also see flying pigs . . .
