Preparing for Daylight Savings Time

This year’s Daylight Savings Time (DST) Change comes three weeks early – and with it, much preparation is needed.

DST is now on March 11, 2007 instead of April 1, 2007. Additionally, DST will end a week late, on November 4, 2007.

The new DST change is causing just about as much uproar as Y2K did. Computer systems across the country could be affected. Programs like Microsoft Outlook are not programmed for the new DST schedule. Real time will fail to align with computer schedules and the effects are widespread – all businesses, individuals and companies should be proactively preparing.

How to deal with the new DST scheduling (via MS-ISAC):

• Identify all time dependent applications.
• Update and apply all appropriate patches to applicable systems after appropriate testing.
• Ensure that your users are aware of the change and pay particular attention to calendar entries during the new daylight saving time periods.
• Validate that all critical systems have the correct time after each rotation of DST to mitigate any possible issues on those hosts.

More information from MS-ISAC here (PDF), from Microsoft here, and from Oracle here.

Thanks to Dan Lohrmann’s CSO blog for the tips ; Tags: dst, daylight savings time, dst schedule, it