Bang Goes the DST Time Bomb

Yesterday, three IT managers' reacted to Microsoft's customer preparedness: Shad Collins, director of IT for Bojangles Restaurants; Kevin Prowell, director of IT for a property management company in Cockeysville, Md; and Robert Rosen, CIO of the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases.

Their reaction today—following the daylight-saving time aftermath—is most revealing.

Three Stories
Rosen, the most critical of Microsoft's preparedness, fared the best following the change of clocks.

There were "no major problems, but some number of people with calendar issues—which is what we expected—because they didn't follow our directions exactly or they did nothing," he said. "[I] expect we'll see more of that over the next three weeks, but no major problems here I'm aware of."

Collins said that "overall it went well for us other than the mad rush to get patches applied and the moving target for MS' patches. We had some machines that even though they were patched, required a reboot."

However, he remained critical because of the arduous process necessary to update Microsoft software.

"Our opinion of MS has decreased as I have little faith that they will handle critical changes in a timely manner in the future based on their attitude from this last event," Collins chided.

Prowell, the most positive—and somewhat praising of Microsoft's efforts—before Sunday is critical today.

"It didn't go as well as I had hoped," he said. "Of course, prior to March 11, 2007, I tested all my servers to ensure they would change to the correct time but I left it up to Active Directory to take care of my desktops—of which I tested a handful before."

While Active Directory updated all of the Windows XP PCs, "most of my 2000 Pro machines did not," Prowell continued. "I had to go around and manually update—launching the script as an admin—for my 2000 Pro workstations."

He emphasized, "It was a busy morning."

For Microsoft the morning was less busy, following several very hectic weeks.

Microsoft support calls were up 20 percent this morning, but down 40 percent from a week ago, according to Rich Kaplan, Microsoft's corporate vice president for customer service, partners and automation.

"Wait time for our premier customers was less than 10 minutes," he said.

Too Much Time
Today, other IT managers offered their post-Microsoft DST reaction.

"Even our XP boxes had problems this morning," said Gene Pizzo Network Administrator for DACCO (Drug Abuse Comprehensive Coordinating Office), in Tampa, Fla. "We had four different times on the PCs! Some [PCs] were on time, some were one hour behind, some were one hour ahead and some were two hours ahead."

While Bojangles faired well, "a sister company of ours uses Outlook meetings extensively and their users are having to manually change their appointments due to the inconsistent behavior from MS' rebase tool," Collins said.

Chad Ingles, an Ontario, Canada-based senior infrastructure analyst supporting about 5000 windows desktop and laptop clients, also took a critical view.

"Microsoft issued knowledge base after knowledge base [article], Webcast after Webcast, patches, updates to patches [and] new guidance, even up to the last week before the time change," he said. "It was all too confusing."

Prowell said that the knowledge base articles proved deficient for real-word circumstances.

"I performed the exact steps Microsoft spelled out in KB914387 and it still didn't work 100 percent," he said.

Despite IT manager misgivings, Microsoft believes the worst already is over.

"My canary in the coal mine has been the number of people in our chat rooms or Live Meetings," said M3 Sweatt, chief of staff for Windows Core Operating System Development.

For one Live Meeting yesterday 14 people attended, compared to more than 1,500 people days earlier.

Not Prepared?
From another perspective, the worst may be the measure of customer dissatisfaction with the DST process. While Microsoft provided support, how-to documentation and online chat sessions at its own expense, some customers are unforgiving of resulting problems. Every IT manager contacted by Microsoft Watch complained of an unnecessarily arduous process for updating Windows 2000 PCs.

"Microsoft had two years to prepare for the DST change and left Windows 2000 users with some scripts instead of a free hotfix download," Pizzo said. "They offered a hotfix download for $4000!"

Sweatt called the price a bargain, given that Microsoft typically charges $40,000 for Windows 2000 outfixes. For DST patches, Microsoft applied the single $4,000 fee to cover all products outside mainstream support.

Prowell expressed sentiments shared by some other IT managers.

"Why couldn't MS take a few minutes of their time and build a patch that could have been downloaded via Windows Update?" he asked. "That way IT managers could have used one of many methods of deploying that patch to their Windows 2000 machines."

Kaplan said that in general patching posed difficulties because of expectations. Typically, Microsoft issues patches or fixes that are specific to application or security issues. But there was a secondary concern that Microsoft couldn't ignore.

"The biggest problem was the remediation of data," he asserted. "Logistically, it was an interesting problem." Worst-case scenario would be the loss of calendaring data.

If data were the only measure of success, Microsoft could possibly declare victory in its DST efforts. So far today, the company has received "no critical calls of data loss," Kaplan said.

Data may be recoverable, but what about time? From business to consumers, Collins expects ongoing problems will persist for awhile.

"I suspect lots of doctor/dentist appointments are going to be missed in the next few weeks," he said.

Related:

• No Saving Time in Microsoft DST Patches?, Microsoft Watch, March 11, 2007
• If a Time Bomb Goes Off You Should..., Microsoft Watch, March 9, 2007
• Microsoft DST Resources, Microsoft Watch, March 9, 2007
• DST Watch, Microsoft Watch, March 9, 2007
• Microsoft Customers Irate over Daylight-Saving Time Woes, eWEEK, March 8, 2007
• Daylight-Saving Time Change: Bigger than Y2K?, eWEEK, Feb. 27, 2007
• eWEEK Labs Sheds Light on Daylight-Saving Time 2007, eWEEK, Feb. 20, 2007
• IT Pros Prepare to Spring Forward, eWEEK, Feb. 2, 2007