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Information Security Office
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Zipped Microsoft Word version of this article for printing.
The Energy Policy Act of 2005 has affected when Daylight Savings Time (DST) will occur. Starting this year the spring date change will occur on the second Sunday of March and the fall date change will occur on the first Sunday of November. This equates to rolling clocks forward on March 11th, 2007 and backwards on November 4th, 2007. This change to DST will occur in the United States and Canada. Mexico will not follow the new DST changes.
The change to DST is going to affect many things from time schedules to computers. Fortunately a major time change has recently occurred in Australia. This means that many companies are aware of this issue and have already begun to address it in their products and procedures. One positive fact that is being expressed by companies in Australia is that the people who planned for the change before it occurred were impacted the least when it went into affect.
Although this might not have a direct affect to most people and procedures the fact still deserves an investigation within your department. Billing, schedules, meetings, and the like may be affected by this change. Gadgets like clocks, VCRs, and cameras might have hard coded DST features that cannot be modified with a patch. Computer systems, software applications, PDAs, cell phones, and other updatable software and hardware will most likely have a downloadable or automatic update that will need to be applied so that it is aware of the difference. Locally developed programs, scripts, and batch jobs may require manual code changes.
This change is not going to cause everything to grind to a halt. After all, DST happens normally every year without much of a second thought. But you can bet that there are going to be a few issues this year on March 12th and November 5th that will be directly attributable to this change. Identifying prospective trouble areas ahead of time and being ready to react to situations will decrease the impact and potential cost in man-hours and money.
Two excellent write ups about this subject can be found on the Internet at:
The following list of resources is a starting point that users and administrators can use to determine just how they and their systems and applications are going to be affected. If you do not see your hardware or software on this list either Google the vendor (e.g. "<vendor> daylight savings time") or call your vendor representative for answers.