Are You Prepared for Daylight Saving Time 2007?

Abstract

The odds are good that the appointments you've made with US or Canadian associates through Microsoft's Exchange or IBM's Lotus Notes or Domino are going to be off by an hour in the last three weeks of March 2007. Your legacy Java runtime environments also will likely produce incorrect time-sensitive results. Why? Buried among the hundreds of provisions in the 1,700 pages of the United States' Energy Policy Act of 2005 is a modest change to the rules that establish when daylight saving time starts and ends. The changes, which the government ostensibly implemented as part of a federal energy conservation effort, require that beginning in 2007, daylight saving time (DST) start three weeks earlier and end one week later than in previous years. (For more information on the policy's history, see the sidebar "US Laws governing daylight saving time.") These new start and end dates can greatly affect IT systems. Users will expect the effects to be transparent, so the burden of managing the situation will fall to IT professionals. Unfortunately, the fixes are not automatic. In this article, we'll describe the possible risks to computer networks and discuss some remediation strategies to keep your systems running on time