One Man’s Plea from DST Purgatory

It is becoming apparent that Microsoft’s Daylight-Saving Time tools for Exchange are not proving particularly effective at correctly updating appointments in people’s calendars. In my own case, I found that my recurring appointments transitioned correctly, while one-off appointments were all (every one of them) an hour off–in my personal calendar. For public resources like conference rooms? I had to redo all of them. Of course, I had to verify these appointment times before I could make that assessment, since I would never remember a meeting time without Outlook. This meant combing though my e-mail to verify times (if you haven’t implemented an index for your e-mail boxes, I highly recommend you get on it–I happen to prefer Windows Desktop Search over Google Desktop, which is a whole other post for later) or calling people whom I scheduled over the phone to find out what their calendars said. But it quickly became apparent that many of my contacts are having the same problem, which has led to some amusing conversations. And generally leading to us acting like we were scheduling the meeting from scratch. Who has been most prepared to deal with this problem? Those with a hard copy, that’s who. So here’s my old, old, oldskool suggestion. Patch gurus everywhere, swallow your digital pride and recommend to your employees to print a copy of their schedule for the next three weeks. It won’t solve the problems introduced by Microsoft’s “solution.” but it may make make the cleanup process a little bit less painful. Please remember to send this reminder before you start doing your DST upgrades. It’s not sexy, but damn, I wish I had done it.