TotalCare Overview
If you are a TotalCare Proactive or higher client of ours, we will be co-coordinating this for you - this is just for your information.
Any other software, not covered by TotalCare, and potentially impacted by this change, needs to be verified with its vendor.
Overview of DST Change
The U.S. Energy Policy Act of 2005, passed by the U.S. Congress July, 2005, extended Daylight Saving Time (DST) in the U.S. by approximately four weeks. As a result, beginning in 2007, DST will start three weeks earlier on March 11, 2007, and end one week later on November 4, 2007, resulting in a new DST period that is four weeks longer than previously observed. These four weeks are referred to in this article as the "extended DST period".
| Change in daylight saving time: |
Previously DST started on: |
With the new law,
DST will start on: |
Previous DST ended on: |
With the new law,
DST will end on: |
First Sunday of April |
Second Sunday of March |
Last Sunday of October |
First Sunday of November |
Would have been:
April 1, 2007 |
Will now be:
March 11, 2007 |
Would have been:
October 28, 2007 |
Will now be:
November 4, 2007 |
Unless certain updates are applied to your computer, it is possible that the time zone settings for your computer's system clock may be incorrect during this four week period. This depends on where you live and which time zone you have selected.
The change in DST will have an effect on many automated and technology reliant products. Individual consumers, small to medium size businesses, and large enterprises may be affected by the new change in time. Computer-system related issues include, for example:
- Calendar / scheduling applications
- Date / time calculations (current and historical)
- Transaction logging (UTC vs. Local Time)
- Tariff billing applications
In many cases, making the necessary changes to accommodate the new DST legislation will be a relatively minor task. Users may need to manually adjust the time on their devices when the change occurs.
In other cases, more substantial efforts may be required. In some cases, systems and applications may need to be updated directly, while in others, the application may simply inherit or "read" the date and time information from the underlying system that it resides on so the changes need only be made to that underlying system. Given the broad range of technology in use today-and the integration of systems between customers, vendors, and partners-business and IT managers should determine what actions should be taken to mitigate the affects of DST 2007 on their organizations.
What you can do to ease the transition
All users of Microsoft products affected by the time change should give extra attention to meetings and appointments scheduled between March 11, 2007 to April 1, 2007 and October 28, 2007 to November 4, 2007, referred to here as the "extended DST period." (In this article, the terms "meetings" and "appointments" will be used interchangeably.) Users should view any appointments that fall into these date ranges as suspect until they communicate with all meeting invitees to make sure that the item shows up correctly on everyone's calendar both internally and externally. To minimize confusion during the affected date ranges:
- Include the time of the meeting in the e-mail request so that invitees can double check the correct meeting time (such as, "Project brainstorming - 11:00 A.M. Central Time").
- Exercise caution with the appointments and meetings in the extended DST period. When in doubt, verify the correct time with the organizer.
- Consider printing out your weekly calendars during the extended DST period prior to applying the Windows patch containing the updated time zone definitions and running the Outlook Time Zone Update tool so that you can keep track of which meetings were scheduled before and after you run the tool.
Conclusion
Please let us know if you need us to assist in any way. As we all learned from Y2K, changes to the computer's clock or calendar could have serious implications.
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