SUBJECT:

Daylight Saving Time Problem with Microsoft Outlook Calendar

Daylight Saving Time (DST) will begin three weeks earlier this year (March 11, 2007) and end one week later (November 4, 2007) as a result of the Energy Policy Act passed by Congress in 2005. Only the newest computer operating systems and software applications have the ability to automatically detect the change in DST. Most systems will require corrective patches or workarounds, but some vendors have not yet finalized their recommendations or fixes.

The calendar in Microsoft Outlook 2003 (and earlier) is one of the products that encounter this problem. As a result, meeting times scheduled on March 11, 2007 thru April 1, 2007 and on October 28, 2007 thru November 4, 2007 may be incorrectly shifted by one hour and cause significant confusion to the user. Therefore, users will need to proceed carefully with corrective actions to minimize incorrect meeting times.

In order to fix the problem, Microsoft has just released a software tool for Outlook and will soon be releasing one for Exchange. These tools have not been thoroughly tested yet and they may have some undesired side effects. Therefore, we recommend that you:

- Contact your system administrator before making any changes.

- Include the correct meeting time in the Subject line of any calendar entries that fall in the extended DST periods.

- Verify the correct meeting times with meeting organizers.

- Do not try to manually correct the times of existing meetings falling in the extended DST periods.

- If one of the tools is applied, verify several meeting times that would fall into the affected time to ensure the proper corrections are applied.

Elazar C. Harel Assistant Vice Chancellor - Administrative Computing & Telecommunications