Australian Daylight Savings Changes - October 2008
In October 2008 we will again be experiencing changes to Daylight Savings in Australia. I wanted to make you aware of these changes so you can plan for them
in your environments. The changes to daylight savings can have significant business impact if you don't deal with them in a proactive manner. You could get incorrect times display on computer clocks, calendaring problems and even significant issues with business critical applications. This could cost you and your users a lot of wasted time and money. As you can see from my capture of the date and time on my PC that it's picking up that the time will change to daylight savings on October 5th 2008. So I'm good to go on this machine. Now I just need to go and check all the machines I use to ensure smooth operations during this change.
Daylight savings will now commence on the first Sunday in October (the 5th) and ends the first Sunday in April. This affects Australian Eastern time zones (New South Wales, Victoria, Australian Capital Territory and Tasmania) and Central (South Australia).
So what will be affected?
- All Microsoft Windows PC, server and mobile devices in the affected time zone.
- Microsoft Outlook calendars may need to be adjusted
- Microsoft, third party and custom applications that schedule events at future dates should be reviewed.
The bottom line is you need to make sure that systems that could be affected have the correct patches and up to date.
So to help you we have produced some resources that you can use to make sure you have minimal user disruption during this time.
Australian Daylight Savings Planning Guide
Microsoft Daylight Savings Blog
The planning guide is what you really need to make sure everything will keep running smoothly. If you have a strong patch management process then you should see little if any impact at all.
