Announcement: A new DST hotfix is available for Morocco 2009 Daylight Saving Time for the Windows platform

As Lourdes posted here on the Daylight Saving Time and Time Zone blog, a new hotfix is available for Morocco 2009 Daylight Saving Time for the Windows platform. This is an update for the Daylight Saving Time for the "(GMT) Casablanca" time zone this year (2009) for computers running Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008…

"Morocco has announced the start of DST for 2009 on June 1st at midnight. The clock will move one hour forward at midnight between May 31st and June 1st, and then move one hour back at midnight between August 20th and August 21st in 2009. There was no DST for Morocco in 2009 prior to this update.

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"More specifically, this update sets DST for Morocco as follows:

DST starts at 23:59:59 on May 31st, 2009

DST ends at 23:59:59 on August 20th, 2009

"Microsoft has produced a hotfix to implement this change. If interested in downloading this hotfix, please refer to KB 970613 titled: “A hotfix is available to update the Daylight Saving Time for the "(GMT) Casablanca" time zone for the year 2009 for Windows XP-based, Windows Server 2003-based, Windows Vista-based and Windows Server 2008-based computers”.

Public service announcement: As noted in a prior post, our product teams are moving to a regular rhythm to update their products and services to reflect these time changes. (For each update release, Microsoft accepts change requests up to a few months prior to the release date.) But changes such as these – and without official notification – are difficult for sysadmins and IT professionals around the world to manage.

And here’s my regular advice for governments: in support of these types of changes, we provide guidance and Microsoft’s Policy in Response to DST/TZ Requests. It’s important for countries and territories to work towards seamless transitions to new DST and time zones policies, providing ample advance notice (of a year or more) with published confirmation of planned changes.

In addition – and this is important – we suggest that entities considering the changes implement changes at the next clock tick after 01:59:59 rather than at 23:59:59, 24:00:00 or 00:00:00. Making the change at midnight can impact daily systems, such as back ups, data pulls or other automated tasks.

Just sayin’.

Tags: Microsoft, Daylight Saving Time, Daylight Savings Time, RSS, DST, Clubhouse, Windows Vista, Windows XP, DST, hotfix; 17,90,000 (up from 3.4M a year ago); 18,000,000 (up from 900K a year ago)