Our Desktop Technology unit has already pushed the Windows O/S Daylight Savings Time patches out to all of our clients. This was done two weeks ago.
We have tested the IBM supplied code on a couple of test servers successfully.
We are now ready to run the agent in the production environment. The question is, will documents created after the O/S patch has been applied be adversely affected by the DST agent? We (still) have some R5 clients in the mix. How will they be affected?
I can’t speak to the code IBM provided to fix mail clients, but the code they give for general applications does NOT appear as if it will work if some documents were saved for the new DST zone on a PC who’s OS has been patched.
There is no technical way (due to the limited information stored in the R5-created entries) to know if an R5 entry was originally created before or after the operating system was updated, which means the agent will adjust all R5 entries regardless of whether they were created after the system was updated. This will result in even “correct” R5 entries (those created after the system was updated) being adjusted, with the effect that they will appear an hour earlier than desired.
There is no technical way (due to the limited information stored in the R5 created entries) to differentiate certain non-US/Canada time zone entries from US/Canada time zone entries, and as such it will assume an entry with a similar GMT offset is US/Canada and will reset it to a US/Canada time zone and will adjust it. For example, there is no way to tell a Mexico City entry from a Central US/Canada entry. The code will change the Mexico City entry to Central US/Canada.
If either of the above are undesired results then you can use one of the following alternatives, either:
Do not enable the R5 update feature for the automated agents, but instead use one of the “selected documents” agents
or
Manually reschedule the R5 entries.
R5-based documents do not contain the StartTimeZone and EndTimeZone fields which allows the default process to determine whether or not the document falls within the updated DST time zones. When ‘ProcessR5’ is set, the agent will parse the TimeZone value stored in the DateTimeValue property of the StartDateTime and EndDateTime fields. It then matches this value to a list of the affected time zones and their offsets. We then create and set the StartTimeZone and EndTimeZone fields within the document to allow the rest of the default agent logic to operate on these R5 documents.
Agents for updating Calendaring and Scheduling entries and Resource Reservation entries for Daylight Saving Time (DST) 2007