It’s so hard to get all of the details in a small sound bite. 😉
I had the pleasure last week to speak with CNET’s Erica Ogg (disclaimer: I read her blog on CNET’s Crave) as she was writing a story on the impacts of Daylight Saving Time. The article, “IT pros battle clock and code in time change,” covers the challenges that IT professionals and systems administrators (as well as regular consumers with PCs and devices in the home and businesses) may have around the whole DST change this year.
Yes, we do have detailed guidance for IT professionals which has quite a bit of detail. We have worked on making it accessible and provide the depth of information that professionals demand. Erica wrote that I said “What’s not clear to some people is that we provide a lot of documentation of these tools. It’s not a single page.”
That’s right. For IT pros and sysadmins, we provide information in several areas, and we’ve added to it since we first published our DST web pages in mid 2006…
General sequence of update actions and special considerations on our main DST 2007 web page, which address most common scenarios for IT professionals
Microsoft IT’s deployment guidance with links to provide information that Microsoft has learned in deploying daylight saving time changes in our own enterprise.
A series of webcasts and technical chats on DST 2007, with information on how to use the tools, and
Video demos for running Exchange and Outlook DST 2007 tools, three demos that our customers can use to familiarize themselves with the process of running the DST tools. We think that the following three scenarios cover what people need to run most often.
For consumers, we provide a step-by-step wizard at http://support.microsoft.com/gp/cp_dst for determining the appropriate actions and updates for your computer. We also have a new wizard available on Office Online article, “Prepare Outlook calendar items for daylight saving time changes in 2007” (go there by clicking on the pictiure at right).
Depending upon the type of customer you are (consumer, working in a company with an IT-managed network, a developer or other), the path you follow to update your computer may be different. That’s the step-by-step wizard I mention above.
For IT pro guidance, note that the guidance we provide to IT pros based on what products and systems they have on their network, particularly for creating and accessing calendar items. In these cases, we have different guidance if you’re primarily an Outlook-based organization, if you create a lot of recurring meetings with OWA, or you’re a heavy user of Blackberry BES or Goodlink messaging servers.
For IT Pros, we provide is a summary of five different scenarios captured based on the various configurations we’ve found in place in customer systems:
Below is a summary of five different scenarios captured in Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB) article 933146 that you may encounter as you update your Exchange organization with the Daylight Saving Time (DST) 2007 updates, and how you can address these scenarios using the patch for the Microsoft Outlook Time Zone Data Update tool. The patch includes additional command-line parameters that have been added to the Outlook Time Zone Data Update tool specifically to address these five scenarios:
1) Ensuring that single instance items created after the date on which the operating system time zone updates were applied are not rebased.
2) Rebasing calendar items and suppressing calendar updates.
3) Rebasing resource mailboxes.
4) Rebasing calendars items stored in public folders.
5) Reporting the changes made by the Outlook Time Zone Data Update tool.
For more details please see these Microsoft Knowledge Base Articles:
· KB article 931667 “How to address the daylight saving time changes in 2007 by using the Time Zone Data Update Tool for Microsoft Office Outlook”
· KB article 933146 “Description of the hotfix package for the Time Zone Data Update tool for Microsoft Office Outlook”
This guidance has been incremental rather than different – it provides recommendation which depends upon the kind of network you have in place, the types of mailboxes you’re rebasing and the type of meetings you create.
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