Saturday, February 10, 2007

Exchange Daylight Savings Time fix

[My advice is still to wait another 2 weeks or so before applying this series of patches]
Okay, I am just as lost as you are. Microsoft is apparently not much farther behind the rest of us when it comes to being confused about this. The biggest and most painful change seems to be the switchover of times in a user's calendar. Microsoft has published a webcast that covers this topic. See KB 932046: "Support WebCast: The impact of daylight saving time on Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Office Outlook" - http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/932046

There is a new Windows hotfix that is also related to this: KB 931836 "February 2007 cumulative time zone update for Microsoft Windows operating systems" - http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/931836

There is an updated version of the hot fix KB 930879: "How to address daylight saving time by using the Exchange Calendar Update Tool" which is the tool that updates the calendar entries. http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=930879

Finally, Microsoft has provided a Virtual PC machine that includes the tools that perfom updates. I have not yet even seen this machine, but it is supposed to have everythign you need to run the Exchange Calendar Update Tool. The following is from someone on the Exchange Team at Microsoft:

The Virtual Machine for Microsoft Exchange Calendar Update Tool is now available on the Download Center at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=03D4251D-370F-486D-BB2F-64FF14C546AD&displaylang=en. You can download this workgroup system, join it to your domain, and use it to run the Exchange Calendar Update Tool.

If you can, please help spread the word about this downloadable machine, as we built is specifically for customers to use to run the Exchange tool. Some larger customers will require several clients in order to perform a timely update. For example, in a recent MSIT pilot, we determined that it would take us about 10 clients running 24x7 for 3.1 days to update our 130,000 mailboxes. This worked out to about 2.9 mailboxes per minute. So the idea with the VHD is to download it once, copy it as many times as you need on your network, and run them concurrently to perform the updates.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home