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Smart planning: Turkey considers a move to DST, but with a two year ramp period

Now this is a positive move.

Turkey is considering moving to daylight saving time (as noted here). 

This year, it’s business as usual, with Turkey’s DST ending at the end of October. But what is particularly important to note: if approved by the government,

“… organizations such as airlines, banks and stock exchange will be given up to two years to adapt and then implementation will begin.” 

I was asked today…

“Why is this such a good move on their part?”

As noted previously here, in order to achieve more seamless transitions to new DST rules and time zones, governments should really strive to provide…

  1. official confirmations of planned changes to DST and time zones, and
  2. provide ample advance notice and concentrated efforts on promoting the change to the affected citizens is a requirement. 

There are plenty of examples I’ve noted here on the scrambling that manufacturers, customers, enterprises and partners face when there is little or no advance notice of these types of changes.  If you look at how Australia approached their upcoming change this past April (more details are available here), the national government allowed more than eight months between the announcement and the actual change.  As noted on the Australia Eastern & Central 2008 Daylight Saving Changes page, the official Australian Government Time web site helped to prepare and educate end users. 

As noted in my previous post, our product teams are moving to a regular update schedule, following the Windows regular cadence for publishing newly legislated DST rules and time zone updates. These semi-annual “Cumulative DST and Time Zone Updates” will be released in November/ December (to the Download Centre and via Windows Update respectively) for the coming calendar year, and in the July/August timeframe when we need a semi-annual update. 

But updates are only good when customers have the appropriate time to plan and deploy.

For each, the window closes for additional updates a few months (generally four to six) prior to the release date.  Our goal is that sysadmins and IT Pros can plan on rolling out and installing/ deploying these cumulative update roll-ups as they are published.

 

One for step for Turkey… one giant leap towards improving DST changes for customers and partners worldwide 😉

Tags: Microsoft, Daylight Saving Time, Daylight Savings Time, RSS, DST.

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