No Saving Time in Microsoft DST Patches?

Robert Rosen, CIO of the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, said that all "vendors waited way too long to get started," on daylight-saving time patches and updates.

"Microsoft in particular requires OS patches and then Outlook calendar modifications," he said. "That makes no sense. If they were storing in UTC [Coordinated Universal Time], the OS patch should have fixed the calendars automatically. This has created an absolute nightmare situation. The time differences between the OS patch and the Outlook fix created a window to cause more calendar entries to be in error."

Rosen emphasized: "Bottom line, MS looks really bad."

Shad Collins, director of IT for Bojangles Restaurants, also took a critical position.

"Microsoft hasn't been very helpful related to the DST situation," he complained. "We ended up creating a batch file that combines a couple of DST fixes that can be used on any Windows 2000+ workstation or server. That fix has been deployed to all 300 or so machines at the corporate office and at our stores."

Windows 2000 is no longer covered by Mainstream Support, which means that businesses must either pay Microsoft $4,000 for a patch or follow instructions for doing it themselves.

However, Rosen doesn't see the do-it-yourself method as an option. "The Windows 2000 fix was impossible for end users to even try," he said.

"I was surprised to see that they wanted $4,000 for older systems like Windows 2000," said Kevin Prowell, director of IT for a property management company in Cockeysville Md.

"The patches should have been free and they should have been released a year ago," Collins asserted. "MS has known about this since 2005."

Prowell was less critical of Microsoft. "I pushed out updates to the clients and servers via Active Directory," he said. "Microsoft had plenty of information on how to do that and the provided scripts as well."

From one perspective, the reaction of Collins and Rosen is surprising, given that Microsoft claims to have apt resources available for patching systems. From another perspective, their frustrations demonstrate the distance between Microsoft and their reality.

All three men administer organizations with mixed Windows desktop and server computers. Patch distribution is proving more difficult for Windows 2000 and older systems. Prowell's shop has two Windows NT 4 servers in production. Their need to manage and patch these older systems is one glaring area of oversight in Microsoft's DST preparations.

M3 Sweatt, chief of staff for the Windows Core Operating System division, said that supporting Windows 2000 and older would require "too many engineering" resources.

However, Microsoft's approach may be shortsighted if businesses realistically run this older Windows versions as much as a decade—or more.

More perplexing are potential shortcomings with patches for Outlook and Exchange.

"It's a bit disappointing that Microsoft did not have the courtesy to make certain that all versions of Outlook in use, even as far back as at least Outlook 2000 or even Outlook 97, received a simple no-fuss and no-bother patch," wrote Keith Risler in comments to another Microsoft Watch story on DST.

Exchange is potentially more problematic. Info-Tech Research Group claims there is problem with Microsoft's daylight-saving time patch for Exchange Server.

"Microsoft Exchange administrators are awash in uncertainty, alarm and confusion at the moment," said Darin Stahl, Info-Tech's research team lead, said in a statement issued on Friday. "Microsoft Exchange servers supporting Outlook 2003 and earlier versions—which include the majority of Outlook calendar users—are affected by this faulty solution from Microsoft, and IT managers need to intervene now to avoid appointment havoc."

Info-Tech blamed the complexity of Exchange rules supporting Outlook calendaring.

"We did apply the Exchange patch," Collins said. "The Exchange patches are still pretty sorry even according to MS. They tell you to have your users manually check/adjust their Outlook appointments if the tool doesn't fix them correctly. The effort from MS seems poorly resourced and done as an afterthought."

Rosen took an equally harsh position about Microsoft.

"If you'd designed the software right, this would have been a trivial fix," he said.

Related:

• 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