It’s Monday morning, March 5th - one week from a new short term national trend of checking our watches and all the clocks in our lives to see which were updated for us correctly, which we planned to update, and which we still need to update.
Obviously, the hope is that most Notes and Domino shops are already either taking action based on the postings on the support sites, mailings to current support users, discussions with sales specialists, etc., If you are not ready yet though, the time is upon us.
In an effort to make sure to efficiently handle queries, and we have had a great many through both traditonal and non-traditional channels, I would invite you to post questions to this forum (linking to your blog if you like) in order to make sure that your question is shared with the community. In watching this space out of the corner of my eye and reading blogs in the evenings, I can point out that Susan Bulloch - http://notesgoddess.net, Chris Miller - http://www.idonotes.com/, Jean-Yves Riverin - http://jyriver.blogspot.com/ among others have all been actively documenting their experiences for us.
In that tradition, I will start posting frequent areas of concern here in this space (along with the answer) in hopes that it will save you some time. This will not, of course, substitute for reading the documentation http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=0&uid=swg21245334 , but will provide with a more interactive space to review questions.
Probably the most frequently asked question I get is “Does every mail file need to have corrective action taken?” or alternately “Do I have to run the agent in ?”
And the answer, in short, is that it depends. It’s not a complicated question, it just has a few considerations which can easily be boiled down to a handful of questions.
First - Do your users typically live or work in an impacted time zone? If yes, then you probably need to run the agent or make a strong effort to communicate to users that manual intervention (in short, a reschedule) is needed.
Second - Do users outside of the impacted time zones interact with users inside the impacted time zones? If yes, then you have a choice to make. Initially, IBM had published an agent that would allow for these users to be taken care of, en mass, by having the agent send reschedule notices to all invitee’s which would mean that agent execution in Europe, Asia, and other non-impacted regions would generally not be needed. After strong user request though, an option was added that would remove the sending of reschedule notices which has the implicit impact of needing to run the agent on all mail files. Of course, if you picked the manual option above, then no additional action is needed.
Third - Do your users in non-impacted regions take advantage of the ability to send invitations in another time zone (specifically ones impacted by the new DST rules)? If the answer to that is “I don’t know” then you are in the majority of all Notes/Domino shops.
These are your key areas of exposure to having data that needs to be updated and there are a copule of other key assumptions being made here as well - first is that users these types of documents should have their OS patched either already, or in plan for soon. Secondly, users that interact with other mail systems are assumed to be taking care of their own calendar entries. That is, that if a Google Mail user sends you an invitation the agent can correct the entry in your calendar, but it can’t go fix their calendar and if you send the Google user an invite, the agent can notify them, but only if you are using reschedule notifications.
So, what can you do? Unless you already have no intention of running the agents to automate calendar corrections, run the “admin” version of the agent in report mode. This will give you an idea of how many pieces of data need to be updated and who in your enviornment is most at risk of having a “bad Monday” if corrections are not made - howto do this is documented in the “agent technote” http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=899&uid=swg21254639 as well as more information about what the agent can do for you and your users.
As always, a good test plan is always going to be important as there may be specifics in your environment that need special attention and IBM strongly suggests testing against an off-line, non-replicating backup of actually production data before wide deployment.
Please post your questions or interests about DST 2007 in this thread for everyone’s benefit as the core challenge of this change really is to make sure that everybody gets updated, not just to update one’s own calendar.