If the Time Bomb Goes Off, You Should...

This afternoon, I spoke with M3 Sweatt, chief of staff for the Windows Core Operating System division, about the time change aftermath—as in what IT organizations should do come Sunday if something goes wrong. I expected some technical advice, but Sweatt gave more pragmatic answers.

People should "check their calendars" to make sure the time of appointments are right, he said. For appointment invitations, "put meeting time and meeting time zone in the subject line," Sweatt added.

Microsoft expects the biggest trouble for businesses will come from appointments being one hour off.

"The biggest confusion starts with tracking time around the world," Sweatt said. Many other countries won't go to daylight-saving time until the end of April.

Microsoft is trying to address both problems with updates to its software applications, but the interaction of disparate computer systems, operating systems or applications introduces variables that will change company to company.

"Most enterprises have at least 1,000 applications" said Lee Nichols, global solutions director for Getronics.

"It's not a one-company problem," Sweatt asserted. "It's an industry-wide problem." For Windows, "the most affected area is calendaring."

I asked Sweatt several times if Microsoft expects problems bigger than calendaring. In one scenario, I asked if users with patched PCs might have trouble accessing an unpatched Exchange Server. For this and other examples, Sweatt returned to the problems of time being off an hour for appointments or uncertain for some other countries.

However, Sweatt did warn IT organizations to manage mobile users.

"Biggest problem I've seen to date are people that are not always connected to the network," he said. Notebooks and even mobile phones will be tricky updates for some organizations.

Because there has been some controversy about Microsoft charging for DST updates, I asked about fees. For products in Mainstream support, which typically is the first five years in the market, DST patches are free. But customers must pay extra for products in Extended Support. Typically, customers would pay $40,000 per hotfix per product, Sweatt said.

"We lowered the fee," he asserted. "We decided to make all daylight-saving time fixes available for a one-time fee of $4,000 for all products." One price covers everything.

Microsoft recognizes that some customers wouldn't pay that much, so the company has posted support articles with step-by-step processes manually fixing Windows 2000 and other products.

Sweatt was somewhat critical of the information being distributed to consumers or businesses—or lack of it.

"We're finding very few public service announcements about the change to DST in 2007," he said. Private industry has taken the lead driving awareness, he emphasized.

Sweatt makes a good point. Considering the potential impact of a change enacted by Congress, more public dissemination of information would make sense.

"At first blush, you don't get what a changed time means to all those intertwined systems," Sweatt said. There is a need to raise awareness. People need to "be prepared."

After internal testing and patching, Microsoft has a pretty good idea what many customers can expect. For those customers that get the unexpected come Sunday morning—the DST time bomb going bang—duck and cover isn't Microsoft's advice.

For the largest customers—the select accounts Microsoft directly manages—there will be "people in the field on call," Sweatt said.

Related:

• 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