The Day The Light Went Out

A couple of days ago, a friend emailed me this. It's the instructions he received from his IT department on updating his computer for the DST change.

Daylight Savings Time (DST) will begin this weekend (March 11th, 2007 at 2:00am). This is 3-weeks earlier than in previous years. DST will also end one week later this year (on 11/4/07 instead of 10/28/07). Since most computers do not recognize that Daylight Savings Time will begin this early or end a week later, an operating system patch was applied. Unfortunately, the patch supplied by Microsoft introduced an error in the way appointments are scheduled in Microsoft Outlook. Any appointment scheduled before the patch was applied on February 18th for any time in the 3/11/07 to 4/01/07 and 10/28/07 to 11/04/07 time frame has been rescheduled for one hour later. The impact of this error is dependent on the number of events a person has scheduled during this time period, the number of calendars a user maintains and whether or not you noticed the error and rescheduled the appointments back to their original time slot.

We have investigated and tested several resolutions for this problem. Unfortunately, an all-inclusive, automated fix that will guarantee that all appointments previously scheduled for these time periods will be returned to their correct time slot is not possible. However, we have identified three ways to deal with this problem. There are two factors to consider when selecting which resolution will work best for you. One factor is the number of events that you have scheduled during these time periods. The second factor is the number of manual corrections you have already made to your calendar if you noticed the error. The greater the number of manual modifications that have been made the more likely it is that you will NOT want to use the fix-it patch.

OPTION 1 is for users with only a few appointments schedued during the 3/11/07 to 4/1/07 and 10/28/07 to 11/04/07 timeframe

Review your calendar and manually adjust any appointments scheduled for the wrong time.

OPTION 2 is for users with many appointments and who have not adjusted any of them manually

Execute the Microsoft fix-it patch TZMOVE according to the instructions described below.

OPTION 3 is for users with many appointments and who have adjusted many of them manually

Because the Microsoft fix-it patch TZMOVE does not know the difference, all of the calendar events during the these time periods will be modified. You have two choices in this case: either run TZMOVE according to the instructions described below and then correct any appointments you already had corrected one more time OR finish manually adjusting events in these time periods.

All users. It is important to note that during this time period you may be receiving a number calendar changes from other users. Please accept these change notifications.

It is also important that you confirm your internal and external appointments with an email or phone call. This change is affecting Kohler Company as well as our vendors and customers. If you have any problems that you cannot resolve, please contact the Technology Service Center, Ext. 74357 or Toll Free: 1-800-992-1562.

TZMOVE Instructions:
Click Start
Click All Programs
Click Netinstall
Click Netinstall Interactive Installer
Click MS Productivity
Click the Time Zone Data Update Tool for Outlook application.
Click Install.
After the install is complete you can close down Netinstall

To run the TZMOVE tool do the following:
Click Start
Click All Programs
Click Microsoft Office
Click Microsoft Office Tools
Click Time Zone Data Update Tool for Outlook

#1 The following screen appears…Press OK



#2 The following screen appears indicating how many appointments it identified.... Press DETAILS




#3 The details of the calendar events are displayed. UNCHECK any appointments that you don’t want to update and then press OK.





Thank you for your patience and understanding on this issue. The Information Technology department understands the importance of calendars to our users. We made every attempt to make this resolution process as manageable as possible. Unfortunately, we could not find a resolution that left our users totally unaffected.

Res Publica has also published a well-informed rant about it at Republic of Dogs.

Most visitors here know my feelings on all things Microsoft, but I'm starting to feel bad for the people who are jsut forced to use them in the name of 'standardization' or 'conformity'. That's no way to live. i know my sitch is atypical - it's just a small office, and of course it's OSX and we don't use Outlook - but here's the sum total of what needed to be done today when I came in and fired up the computers:


...




Yeah, I actually forgot about it until I looked at the wall clock and noticed it said something different than my computer.

You'd like to think that after Y2K, people at MS had maybe tumbled to the idea that changes in time may have a wide ranging impact, and when these things come up, workarounds need to be investigated. Actually, my bet is that software engineers at MS knew this was going to come up, and had been trying to be allowed to solve the problem, but the idea got lost somewhere between the knowledge of the problem and somebody allocating a budget and time to fix it. or else, true Dilbert fashion, the fix had been scheduled for completion two to three months after today.

But take another look at that process up there. It represents how many hours of lost productivity in how many companies, businesses, and governments across America? All because some years ago, a software writer at MS decided that hardcoding the DST change was a good enough solution. And this decision becomes compounded by the monolithic dependency on Microsoft.

Good luck, folks.