Sweat the Small Stuff for Daylight-Saving Change

With the accelerated daylight-saving change approaching this week, many businesses and IT users probably feel pretty secure that they have done everything necessary to protect themselves from any problems that the daylight-saving change will cause. They’ve read articles like eWEEK Labs’ advice on how to update enterprise applications and systems to be ready for the time change. So everything should be hunky dory, right? But what about all of the little things that you might be forgetting? For example, how about all of the smart phones and PDAs that your staff (and especially executives) are using? Modern phones basically have operating systems themselves and if phones aren’t updated, those updates you made to your Exchange server still won’t stop the boss from missing his key meetings. So make sure that you check and update all of your cell phones such as your Palm Treos, BlackBerrys and Windows Mobile devices. And then there are the appliances that are all over your corporate landscape. Sure, the bigger appliances for firewalls and messaging run full versions of operating systems and will most likely be easy to update to handle the DST change. But some of your smaller appliances might not be as good about updating their software and may even require a full firmware upgrade to be compliant with the new DST. For example, got a bunch of SMB Linksys or D-Link routers in your offices? Do you use time-based access controls or rely on accurate logging from these devices? Then you should head to the vendor Web sites and make sure you have the latest firmware running on them. By double-checking every piece of hardware in your hardware environment, you should be able to avoid potential problems that could occur after March 11. And, oh yeah, don’t forget to check your cell phones and appliances at home too. They’ll need to be updated as well. Of course, some appliances are so old that no updating will work. For example, my VCR will just always be wrong about daylight-saving time from now on. Luckily, I don’t use it that much anymore.