The United States Government passed a law in 2006 to add 3 weeks in March and 1 week at the end of October to Daylight Savings Time (DST). This change affects all applications that provide automated calendar services. Microsoft has released a set of patches for Microsoft server and workstation software, such as Windows, Exchange, and Outlook. Since the original patches were released in January-February, several locations throughout the world, including Caucasus, Armenia, New Zealand, GTB and Jordan have adopted new DST rules to be implemented this Fall. Microsoft has released new timezone update patches KB933360 which supercede the original patches KB931836. If you do not have either servers or Outlook clients that are affected by these new DST changes and you followed Microsoft’s recommendations for DST Changes during the months of January through March, no further action is necessary.
How is ERM impacted by the DST change? The Exchange server provides time and time zone information to ERM. As a result, ERM does not require any patches or updates related to the DST change. If all the appropriate patches and tools from Microsoft are correctly applied to your organization’s servers and workstations, ERM should continue to process the resource meeting requests properly. However, the process of applying the patches and running the rebasing tools is not a trivial task.
Per Microsoft recommendations, it is necessary to run the rebasing tools. The rebasing tools will send updates to meetings on user calendars in sequence. As a result, if there are adjacent bookings on a resource calendar managed by ERM, it is possible that the updated meeting request from one of the users will be declined during the rebasing process.
To prevent existing meetings from being declined by ERM-managed resources while they are being updated, we published suggestions of how to patch your environment based on our testing. It complements Microsoft's recommendations. You can find this information at http://www.swinc.com/products/ERM/dst.asp. We also have a new ERM forum at http://ermsupport.swinc.com/ that has information about the DST change.
- Apply Server patch KB933360 (replaces KB931836)
- Apply Workstation patch KB933360 (replaces KB931836)
- Apply Exchange CDO patch KB926666
- You may need to also apply KB932599
- Ensure that all affected meetings on the ERM-managed resource calendars in the extended DST period have their "Show time as" set to "Free". To help automate this, you can download a free script to be used for United States time zones during DST Change period.
- Run the rebasing tool (MSEXTMZ.Exe) against the Exchange server, rather than the Outlook Time Zone Tool (TZMove.Exe), for all events (recurring/single)
If you feel you would like further assistance, Simpler-Webb offers a full range of Microsoft server management and consulting services. We can help you with the DST patching of your servers for a fee. Please contact us for availability.
Best regards,
Simpler-Webb ERM Support Team