Preparing your Windows Environment for Daylight Saving Time Changes in 2007

In August 2005, the US congress passed an act that has the main goal of increasing the amount of time people spend in daylight, therefore decreasing their energy consumption. This act, dubbed the Energy Policy Act of 2006, will come into effect a few weeks from now. DST will now start 3 weeks earlier on March 11 and will end one week later then it used to on Nov. 4th. What does this mean for most of you? More time under the sun. And what does this mean for us, The system and network administrators of the world? Trouble, all sorts of trouble, especially for those of us who are currently supporting large windows 2000 environments and are running any versions of Exchange / Outlook previous to version 2007 on their domain.

As a result of this new DST ruling, system administrators in affected countries will have to work extra hours to set up a bunch of updates / registry hacks on their networks so that their environment can keep up with the new time adjustment.

To help you guys out with this very unpleasant task, here are a few links that should help you get started the right way.

• How to configure daylight saving time for the United States in 2007
• February 2007 cumulative time zone update for Microsoft Windows operating systems
• Support WebCast: Deploying Microsoft Windows 2000 updates for daylight saving time changes for worldwide use
• Unofficial Windows 2000 Daylight Saving Time Patch
  
  Microsoft is releasing patches to update 2003, XP, and Vista to the new 2007 Daylight Saving Time. They will not release a patch for 2000, and customers are told to manual patch their OS via a few registry tweaks or to simply upgrade to a newer version of Windows. IntelliAdmin has created an unofficial patch that will update Windows 2000 and NT machines with the new Daylight Saving Time settings. I did not test this patch yet, so I cannot tell if it works as advertised. Use it at your own risk.
  
  
• Update for daylight saving time changes in 2007 for Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2
• Exchange Server and Daylight Saving Time (DST) 2007
• Prepare Outlook calendar items for daylight saving time changes in 2007

Have you noticed that there isn't any links telling about how to patch an Exchange 2000 server? The reason for this is that since the product has entered in its extended support phase on the 10th of january, Microsoft will not be giving out this patch to anyone unless they are ready to shell out $4000 or have signed an extended support contract with them.

By doing this, Microsoft will be forcing a lot of people to migrate their old exchange mailing infrastructure to a newer one, taking advantage of the situation to make a few bucks.

Depressing isn't it?