For many Entourage users prior to today, March 2007 was a month to lose sleep over. The United States Energy Policy Act of 2005 shifted the observation of Daylight Savings Time from the first Sunday in April to the second Sunday in March. As a result, a majority of us living in the United States lose an extra hour of sleep in the month of March. Further, many software applications and gadgets simply didn't know about the new DST rules as they were designed and developed before the law was passed, Entourage among them.

Today’s release of the 11.3.3 update delivers a significant change to Entourage’s time zone support, including support for the new DST dates. Prior to this fix, events in the month of March 2007 (starting 3/11) were off by an hour for the majority of US customers. I highly recommend customers update to this release of Entourage prior to the beginning of Daylight Savings observation in 2007. The update seamlessy ensures that your calendar is updated to reflect the new DST rules and improves overall time zone reliability.

Behind the scenes, the issue stemmed from Entourage’s inability to support multiple daylight savings rules. The last major change in daylight savings across the United States was in 1987, well before the creation of Entourage. Our calendaring engine assumed that daylight savings would always be observed at the same time year after year. We've fixed these issues in this update.  Entourage now supports multiple daylight savings rules and improves compatibility with the Mac OS’ time zone and daylight savings functions (support for the DST change was included in Mac OS 10.4.6).

 

-Andy