It’s that time of year again when many countries switch on or off Daylight Savings / Summer time … and so begins the twice yearly headache for Outlook users. There’s a useful online wizard to help, from a surprising source.
It’s that time of year again when many countries switch on or off Daylight Savings / Summer time … and so begins the twice yearly headache for Outlook users.
This time it’s the turn of our Aussie friends who have to deal with a change in their state-by-state time zone rules. The next change (for many Aussie states) is on 6 April 2008 (ie first Sunday in April) not the last Sunday in March.
Phil Young (friend of Office Watch) reported some of his ‘all day’ appointments were shifted by one hour so they appeared across two days. Here’s how Outlook can display an ‘all day’ appointment:
This is a common problem because of the silly way Outlook handles both all-day events and time zones.
A solution to his problem came from a surprising source … a Microsoft marketing email! In the message was a link to a fairly straight-forward online wizard which solved Phil’s problem. All his ‘shifted’ appointments returned to their proper day and he knows that Windows has the latest time zone data.
So by all means try the wizard here. There are supposedly six steps and most people will be able to skip from step 2 over to the ‘last’ step. Sadly the final step is really just a link to more hurdles with the Time Zone Data Update tool.
That works at home, but at Phil’s work it’s a different story. A message went out to staff in the large organization to print out a copy of all appointments between Sunday30 March – Saturday5 April then ensure all computers are shut-down over the weekend in advance of a major systems update to cope with the problem. After the systems update over Easter, staff had to take another printout of their calendar and compare pre and post update calendars to make sure everything was OK.
Step 3 in Microsoft’s wizard suggest taking a printout of the calendar for 30th March 2008 to 6th April 2008 and 5th October 2008 to 26th October 2008. However there’s no later step to suggest checking your calendar before and after the updates.
All of which doesn’t indicate a high degree of confidence in the process either at Microsoft or their corporate customers.
About the Wizard
It’s great that Microsoft has this online wizard to deal with the time zone issue, but in a way it only serves to show how horribly broken the Microsoft system is.
There’s something terribly wrong when the world’s largest software company doesn’t trust their own wares to the extent that they recommend printing out your calendar before updating your computer with their patches.
It’s also a bit much to expect your average computer user to dig into the bowels of Windows Update to check if a particular time zone update (known only by a technical support or ‘KB’ number) is installed.
The fact that Microsoft has taken so many years, versions of Windows and Outlook to come up with this online wizard shows what a low priority time zones are at Redmond.
Mind you, kudos to the team at Microsoft who have taken ownership of this problem. While some of the support web pages are ludicrously complex (almost byzantine) the Microsoft staff have done a good job even down to a proper revision history. Their work is an example of how Microsoft should deal with support matters.
You can only hope the team is allowed to look beyond the short-term support issues and have some effective input into preventative future developments. There’s a fundamental flaw in Windows and missing features in Outlook – Microsoft shows no interest in fixing either so their customers can look forward to future daylight savings debacles.
