How to Prepare for Extended Daylight Savings Time
If you are like me, then you didn’t pay much attention to the email that your tech support team sent around last week regarding the extended daylight saving time and how to prepare for it. If you are asking yourself “What is Extended Daylight Savings Time?”, then you better keep reading this post…
In 2005 Congress passed a bill extending Daylight Savings Time (DST) in the United States. 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.
The change in DST is having impact globally on all users of Microsoft Outlook. Outlook calendar entries may appear one hour off during the extended DST periods in March and November however, we are already starting to see calendar discrepancies as companies patch their systems.
Correcting Time Zone information for Outlook calendars varies per user environment. No single patch or fix is available to correct time zone change issues en masse.
The best way to address the time issues in your calendar is to prepare a printed record of your calendar for the three weeks of extended Daylight savings time. By printing this calendar in advance you will be prepared to compare your Outlook calendar to your printed calendar to identify any time discrepancies and correct them.
For appointments scheduled during the Extended Daylight Savings Time period, please include the date and time in the meeting subject and/or description to help mitigate possible time discrepancies. Also pre-confirm meetings during this period to avoid missed meetings.
This issue will be minimal in the future extended time zone periods because your servers and workstations are now updated with the new time zone definitions. Calendar entries created after the new Time Zone definitions are applied will adjust to the new DST dates automatically.
How To print your Outlook 2003 Calendar:
1. Open Outlook 2003 on your workstation.
2. Click on the Calendar icon.
3. Set your view the 7 Week on the icon bar.
4. Advance the calendar to the week starting on Sunday March 11, 2007. To advance your calendar, use the vertical scroll bar to the right of the calendar and scroll down.
5. With the calendar view on screen, click File -> Print from the menu bar.
6. On the print dialog box, confirm that the print range includes the dates for the 1st week and weekly style is selected and then click OK to print.
7. Repeat these steps the two additional weeks March 18 24 and March 25-31. These three weeks cover the extended Daylight period.
8. Additionally, repeat these steps for any public folder calendars or resource calendars in your organization.
9. Starting on March 11, compare your Outlook calendar to the printed copy for the weeks in question and edit Calendar items that are incorrect after the time zone change.
Russ:
Microsoft has a number of patches, each for a specific application and OS, available from the download section of Microsoft.com. These will, in most cases, be applied when you run automatic update from your IE browser.