Microsoft Has Tools Available for Daylight Savings Time Shift

Published: March 7, 2007

by Alex Woodie

Daylight Savings Time begins Sunday, three weeks earlier than normal. For some computers, including Windows PC and server applications, this could create some problems. To help customers address the new time change, Microsoft has released several tools--specifically for Outlook and Exchange Server--that automatically resolve the problems, so customers don't have to update the programs by hand.

Microsoft has two tools available to help Outlook and Exchange users, including the Microsoft Office Outlook Time Zone Data Update Tool and an Exchange Wrapper for the Outlook tool. Both updates are available for free for products under mainstream support. For products that are in Extended Hotfix Support, such as Windows 2000 and Exchange 2000, there is a fee of $4,000.

The Outlook tool, which is designed to be used by end users, finds all the entries in the users' calendars during the four-week window (three weeks in March and one week in the fall, because the end of Daylight Savings Time has been pushed back a week), and moves the meetings back an hour so they're on the right time. For meetings where the tool isn't sure what time zone, or what rule, the meeting was created under, the tool asks the user what to do.

Companies that don't want their users to manually reconfigure their Outlook calendars can use the Exchange Wrapper for the Outlook Time Zone Data Update Tool, which runs the meeting change utility against all of their user mailboxes on the server without having to introduce the end-users into the equation,

Microsoft also has a fix available for companies running Outlook Web Access, the Research In Motion BlackBerry Enterprise Server, or IBM's Lotus Notes connector.

Microsoft pushed out an update that changes the start and end of Daylight Savings Time for non-Windows Vista PCs on February 14. All computers with Automatic Update turned on automatically got that fix. Windows Vista and Outlook 2007 don't need the fix because they were developed after the U.S. Congress passed the new law extending Daylight Savings Time in 2005.

For more information, visit www.microsoft.com/dst2007.

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