On February 5 and February 13, I wrote about the changes to Daylight Savings Time (DST) in the US and Canada, and how these changes required software patches.
Phil Wainewright writes that last week, Microsoft finished releasing its official patches for DST. According to Mary Jo Foley, a noted IT journalist who has followed Microsoft for years, MS just released the DST patches for Microsoft Dynamics. That product is Microsoft’s entry into the customer relationship management (CRM) field, an industry dominated by smaller vendors like Salesforce.com and NetSuite.
Of course, these vendors have patched their web-based on-demand software already, as their programs don’t require a corporate server installation like Microsoft Dynamics does.
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes notes that while the DST changes aren’t as bad as Y2K, the conversion will give IT departments headaches for the next few weeks. Managers and technicians are discovering that Microsoft’s patches must be applied in a specific order, or they won’t work correctly.
In the past, Microsoft’s patches have been easier to apply. For most users, Microsoft Update or Windows Update, the built-in patch management systems in Windows, would handle the patching process for Microsoft products.
This time, DST patch management is a colossal mess and Microsoft has dropped the ball. For example, next Monday morning, mainland users who patched their copy of Outlook before their IT staff patched the company’s Exchange server will find their Outlook appointments could be one hour off. It depends on how the user connects to the Exchange server.
While the state of Hawaii does not observe Daylight Savings Time, plenty of companies and employees in the state do business with the mainland. Unpatched versions of Outlook and Exchange may report that conference calls start an hour early or late, for example. Mainland call centers that handle Hawaii-based customers may have similar issues.
Margie Semilof noted that , Shavlik Technology and BigFix customers received their list of approved patches last month, as each company completed their respective tests of the available software patches. Eric Schultze, Shavlik’s chief security architect, said that keeping up with the changing inventory of patches has been a challenge for the firm. Both companies build their own patches for older versions of Windows, including Windows NT 4.0.
Of course, none of these patches address time and clock functions in hardware. Some PDAs and cell phones will need patches, for example. Clocks and watches that synchronize to atomic clocks on the mainland may be one hour off for the four-week period between March 11 and the traditional start of DST, the second Sunday of April or April 8.
In the meantime, some IT administrators will be hoping that the Easter Bunny is carrying software patches in his basket this spring.
Comments on this entry are closed.