14 DAY TRIAL // Times are changing... literally, but Microsoft's latest operating system, Windows Vista, is not affected, provided that Automatic Updates are turned on. In 2007, Americans have felt the repercussions of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 signed by President George W. Bush on August 8, 2005. Essentially, the Energy policy Act expanded the Daylight Saving Time in North America by no less than four weeks. In 2007, DST began in March and it is scheduled to end in November. While DST is virtually a non-issue for home users, the same is not valid for corporate environments having to manage large volumes of machines and a variety of programs.
The alterations introduced to the "flow" of time echoed across Microsoft's products. "When you have a situation that impacts multiple products - and in our case there were changes for Windows, Exchange, Outlook and other products - it creates a very complex scenario for IT customers. We have to be better at addressing these types of situations. Our documentation and guidance needs to be very clear and concise, and we need to think through the cross-product, cross-platform and services issues. We learned a lot there in terms of how to think through defining the problem, and how to prescribe steps across multiple products," revealed Rich Kaplan, vice president of Supportability and Customer and Partner Experience (CPE) at Microsoft.
In March 2007, Microsoft's Exchange, Windows Server, Microsoft Office, the Windows Client divisions collaborated extensively in order to ensure that the time change would deliver no impact to customers. Microsoft offers the Daylight Saving Time Help and Support Center for users that need to manually update their software. Still, the Redmond company emphasized that the update infrastructure that it has set up should take care of the problem on its own.
"For the majority of our customers - consumers, small- and mid-sized businesses - we always tell them to have automatic updates turned on. With Windows XP and Windows Vista, you really get increased product quality, not just the latest updates to align the operating system with a Congressional mandate like Daylight Saving Time, but the latest security fixes and other general updates too. So that's always a good thing to do," Kaplan added. "In this environment, if you got the updates in the spring for Exchange, Windows and Outlook, and you have your automatic updates turned on, there's a good chance you may have nothing to do in anticipation of the changes this fall."