Joris Evers quoted me this week in his CNET article “Wake up to the ‘daylight-saving’ bug” on the changes in 2007 to daylight saving time (DST). I listen to his security webcasts and I enjoy his articles.
“There has been a great deal of speculation of what the impact could be,” said M3 Sweatt, chief of staff of Microsoft’s customer service team. “For most people, the most apparent issue is that meetings and reminders may appear to be off by one hour.”
I’m part of the Windows Core Operating System Division at Microsoft; my trusty cohort in DST at the office is Rich Kaplan, who leads our Customer Support and Services group.
Joris then went on to say that “…Microsoft may be downplaying the risk. Some say those companies that don’t pay full attention to the issue are in for a rude awakening.”
Downplaying? I don’t think so. It’s an impact, and I think I’ve said as much: some companies may still be unaware of the impact and I appreciate the coverage in Joris’ article and others, and hope that it will help illuminate the issue.
With all apologies to Joris, this is not a bug in code as we saw in Y2K: the issue has to do with a government change to the DST entry and exit dates, and applications, services and clocks throughout the US and Canada (and many places around the world) will feel the impact.
Also, Outlook isn’t affected, but we do offer tools to rebase meetings that may be impacted (so no update or patch for Outlook is required). Windows Client and Server OS are, and the updates have been available for some time. For IT Professionals, we recommend that they deploy updates in a particular order as closely as possible, but the real advice is to ensure that IT administrators communicate with their customers (internal end users) on what’s happening. We’re doing this with our own staff at Microsoft, and shared the details in webcasts last week with MSIT.
Tags: Microsoft, Windows Vista, Windows, Vista, Daylight Saving Time, Daylight Savings Time, DST. 434,345; 684,350; 896,087