New Zealand 2007 Daylight Saving Changes : Exchange

New Zealand time zone differs between Windows Vista and down-level Windows OSes - 1st of January is approaching!

nzdst — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 00:24:00 GMT

Hi All,

We sent this information out in September during the mad rush of customers preparing for the Daylight Savings change, however this may have fallen off the radar for customers running Vista and Outlook. Customers running Windows Vista and Outlook will need to rebase their calendars again after the 1st of January (and as close to the 1st of January as possible).

Please refer to this post for more information
- http://blogs.msdn.com/nzdst/archive/2007/09/20/new-zealand-time-zone-differs-between-windows-vista-and-down-level-windows-oses.aspx

Nick.

December 2007 cumulative time zone update for Microsoft Windows Operating Systems

nzdst — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 23:53:00 GMT

Hi All,

This update supersedes and replaces update 933360, which was released in August 2007. This update also includes additional time zone changes that were signed in to law after update 933360 was created. If you have already deployed update 933360, read the descriptions of the specific time zone changes that are addressed in this Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB) article to determine whether you must deploy this update immediately. If systems are not directly affected, you can schedule deployment at the next available opportunity. We recommend that you deploy the most current Windows cumulative time zone update to guarantee the consistency of the time zone database on all systems.

Important Before you apply the update that is described in this article, be aware of potential issues that may affect Microsoft Office Outlook. For more information about these issues, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

931667 How to address the daylight saving time changes in 2007 by using the Time Zone Data Update Tool for Microsoft Office Outlook

Important

•

If you are running Microsoft Exchange Server in an Information Technology (IT) environment, you must take additional measures to guarantee the correct operation of Exchange Server. For more information about the Exchange daylight saving time (DST) update, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

941018 How to address daylight saving time by using the Exchange Calendar Update Tool

•

Cumulative time zone updates contain only data that has changed for a specific region or that has been added to maintain parity with other operating system versions. Therefore, if a time zone key has been deleted, some original values may not be restored after you apply the cumulative zone update. We do not recommend that you delete any registry keys that are related to time zones. On a computer that has incomplete time zone keys, first restore the time zone keys from a known good backup. Then, apply the update.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/942763

The above packages will be pushed out via Windows Update 11 of December (US Pacific Time) and when Custom Support Agreement packages will be available via connect.

Nick.

New Zealand time zone differs between Windows Vista and down-level Windows OSes

nzdst — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 00:35:00 GMT

Introduction

Windows encodes the time zone transition dates on a yearly basis yielding the following rules for years 2006, 2007, and 2008:

	DST End	DST Start
2006	Third Sunday in March	First Sunday in October
2007	Third Sunday in March	Last Sunday in September
2008	First Sunday in April	Last Sunday in September

The definition of the New Zealand time zone differs between Windows Vista and down-level Windows OSes. Specifically, the difference between OSes relates to which time zone rule each OS returns as the currently active rule; Vista returns the 2007 rule shown in the table above while other Windows OSes return the 2008 rule.

This difference exists because Vista is designed to keep the 2007 rule as the active rule until December 31st, at 11:59:59PM. At midnight, January 1st , Vista will automatically activate the 2008 rule. Previous OSes such as Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 do not have the capability to automatically switch rules, so after the time zone patch under KB 933360 is applied; they make the 2008 rule active.

This inconsistency causes user-visible differences in the functioning of the Outlook Calendar on Vista versus non-Vista OSes. The below is intended to explain the end-user visible affects as well as provide some guidance on how to best plan for rebasing calendars in this region.

Example

In the following example, two weekday recurring appointments were created on fully patched OSes. Both computers had the current time zone set to New Zealand and both created the appointments such that they occurred from 12:00pm to 12:30pm local time. In the screen shots below, the green series was created on a down-level OS (and, therefore, encoded using the 2008 time zone rules for New Zealand) while the red series was created on Vista (and, therefore, encoded using the 2007 time zone rules for New Zealand).

As can be seen in the table above, this means that the two recurrences differ by how they were encoded between the third Sunday in March and the first Sunday in April. To illustrate the issue, let us now display the items on the two different machines:

Down-level OS

On the down-level OS, the 2008 New Zealand rule is in force and, therefore, daylight savings time ends on April 6th. This means that the item encoded in 2008 rules continues to occur at noon but the item encoded with 2007 rules now appears an hour too late since it was encoded under the expectation that daylight savings time is no longer in force.

The discrepancy continues until we get to the first Sunday in April, at which point both appointments return to their intended local time.

Windows Vista

When viewed on Vista, exactly the same appointments in the same store look different. Again, everything agrees except for the “delta” between the third Sunday in March and the first Sunday in April only, on Vista, it is the item encoded with 2007 rules that continues to look correct while the item encoded in 2008 rules now looks an hour early because it was encoded under the expectation that daylight savings time would continue and the Calendar is being displayed as if it does not.

As above, the discrepancy continues until we get to the first Sunday in April, at which point both appointments return to their intended local time.

Outlook Calendar Rebasing

The Time Zone Data Update Tool for Microsoft Office Outlook is aware of the above discrepancy and attempts to handle it as correctly as possible. Specifically, the client-side tool will detect the OS on which it is running and behave as expected on the assumption that all appointments were created on that OS. Some examples (assuming a fully patched machine in all cases):

• When run on Vista during 2007 with the time zone set to New Zealand, the tool will assume that any appointments that lack time zone information were created using the 2006 rules and will transition all appointments to the 2007 rules.
• When run on Vista during 2008 with the time zone set to New Zealand, the tool will assume that any appointments that lack time zone information were created using the 2007 rules and will transition all appointments to the 2008 rules.
• When run on a down-level OS in either 2007 or 2008, the tool will assume that any appointments that lack time zone information were created using 2006 rules and will transition them directly to the 2008 rules.
It is worth noting that, in all versions of Outlook, all recurrences are stamped with time zone information and, therefore, there is no ambiguity in behaviour. Single instance items, on the other hand, are not stamped with time zone information on Outlook 2003 SP2 and earlier so, in such cases, care will have to be taken to review the times of all single-instance appointments to ensure that the updated calendar items are correct.

All of the behaviour described above is specific to the latest version of the Time Zone Data Update Tool for Microsoft Office Outlook and the Exchange Calendar Update Configuration Tool. Previous versions of both tools do not behave properly in time zones such as New Zealand so users/administrators should be sure to have the latest versions of the appropriate rebasing tool before starting. The latest versions of the Time Zone Data Update Tool for Microsoft Office Outlook and the Exchange Calendar Update Configuration Tool along with supporting documentation can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931667 and http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941018 respectively.

Mitigations

Here are some things to think about as you consider your plans for rebasing Calendars in the New Zealand time zone:
• It is beneficial to rebase a calendar on the OS from which the majority of single instance items were created (although care still needs to be taken to ensure that the correct updates were applied).
• In the case of Vista, users will have to rebase their Calendar a second time in January of 2008. It is recommended that this rebasing be done as early in 2008 as possible so as to avoid user confusion as late March and early April approach.
• If using the Exchange Calendar Update Configuration Tool, the above logic applies to the machine from which the Exchange Calendar Update Configuration Tool was run (i.e. that machine should be chosen such that it matches the most common OS deployed across the company and a second rebasing will have to be scheduled if users create appointments using Vista).

Conclusion

There are three end-user visible side-effects to the interaction of the Outlook Calendar and the definition of the New Zealand time zone on various Windows OSes:
1. When looking at appointments in late March or early April, there will be a discrepancy between the local time at which the appointments appear to start and end.
2. Users that only use down-level OSes to create/edit items on their Calendar need to rebase only once, during the fall of 2007.
3. Users that use Vista to create/edit items on their Calendar will need to rebase twice: once in the fall of 2007 and again in January of 2008 in order to transition any items encoded using the 2007 time zone rules into the 2008 time zone rules. Once this step is successfully completed, anomalies such as the above should simply disappear.

We greatly appreciate the assistance and feedback that Graham Codd provided on this issue.

Nick.

Updated Instructional Videos for Time Zone updates

nzdst — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 20:30:00 GMT

Hi there, there are lot of new instructional videos that the product groups have produced. If you using any of the rebasing tools then I would recommend that you watch these. I have also attached the link to the now released exchange tool.

Brad

Exchange Calendar Update Tool

Please find the released version of the exchange calendar update tool: http://support.microsoft.com/?id=941018

Instructional Videos

On-Demand (hosted by Channel9.MSDN.com)

DST: Cumulative Time Zone Update for Microsoft Windows

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=341535

DST: Using the Outlook v2.0 Time Zone Data Update Tool

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=341649

DST: How to Address Daylight Saving Time in Exchange Server by Using the Exchange Calendar Update Tool v2.0

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=341747

Microsoft Download Center (table of contents included – use as a reference)

VIDEO: Cumulative Time Zone Update for Microsoft Windows and Windows Mobile

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=1E55473C-80FF-4E87-A48F-3BC872EF39AA&displaylang=en

VIDEO: Using the Time Zone Data Update Tool for Microsoft Office Outlook v2.0

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=1A511C92-A45B-46ED-9848-64349EEBD040&displaylang=en

VIDEO: Using the Time Zone Data Update Tool for Microsoft Exchange Server v2.0

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=A05519EF-B698-4A60-8292-D22D35393E43&displaylang=en

How to address daylight saving time in Exchange Server by using the Exchange Calendar Update Tool

nzdst — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 11:38:00 GMT

Hi All,

Steve Justice, Escalation Engineer from our Microsoft Exchange Support Team provides a walkthrough of using the Exchange Calendar Update Tool to update misplaced items in a calendars in an Exchange environment.

For more information about the Exchange Calendar Update Tool, see the following Knowledge Base article:

How to address daylight saving time in Exchange Server by using the Exchange Calendar Update Tool
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=930879

The walk through video is here - http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=341747

Update - Courtesy of Ed Morris (17 September 2007)

On Exchange 2007, the "Grant Mailbox Permission" script cannot be run.

To assign full permissions across all mailboxes on an Exchange 2007 server, the Exchange Management Shell one-liner is:

Get-Mailbox –Server <Exchange 2007 server name> | Add-MailboxPermission –User “<user you wish to grant full mailbox rights to>” –AccessRights FullAccess

Update - Courtesy of Tyrone Moore (24 September 2007)

Exchange Update Tool fails with Error 0x80070057 when 'OS Patch Date' is Set - To address this issue proceed with "Operating System patch date" as default, then run the exchange calendar update tool to rebase the calendar items.

Nick.

What version of TZMove are you using?

nzdst — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 06:09:00 GMT

Hi All,

There was new version of tzmove.exe published to the web on the 30th of August. We highly recommend customers use this version and remove earlier versions. The knowledge base article that references this new version was update on the 5th of September 2007.

To check what version you are using please check the version of TZmove.exe file. This is located here:

“C:\program files\microsoft office\office 12\office outlook time zone data update tool\tzmove.exe”

The version should be 12.0.4518.1062, otherwise please click on the link above to download the latest version.

Changes

We rolled up all of the “hotfixes” that were made to the original tzmove shortly after it was released and included them in the ‘core’ version of the new release (e.g. additional functionality that is useful for rebasing resources, updated logic about prerequisites for install, etc.)

A streamlined UI, that by default, doesn’t confuse the end-user with options related to ‘physical’ moves between time zones (e.g. a user permanently moving from New York to LA and wanting to update their Calendar appropriately). Specifically, the time zone move UI is now hidden unless you provide a command-line parameter to explicitly unhide it.

Update - Steps to reporting the changes that will be made by the Outlook Time Zone Data Update tool.

You can see what modifications will be made by the Outlook Time Zone Data Update tool by using the /REPORTINGMODE option. This option creates a log that can be used for planning purposes. /REPORTINGMODE does not perform any modifications, and instead it logs the items that would be modified if the tool were not run in Reporting Mode to the Application event log.

Update (20th September) - Re-occurring appointments created by deleted users

For the deleted mailbox, users need to update those meetings manually, as there is no mapi profile to therefore connect to and update the appointments.

Nick.

NZ DST Guidance Document Updated

nzdst — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 04:01:00 GMT

This latest version of the NZ DST Guidance Document (version 1.3) is now available for download online here.

This includes updates to the following KB articles:

Windows (Vista, XP, Server 2003 SP1 & SP2 and Small Business Server 2003)
Sharepoint
Dynamics
SQL Notification Services

- New Version of TZMove

- Exchange Admin Server tool released

- Updating to Sequencing of patches (depending on your environment)

- Windows Mobile Installation

Nick.

How to Re-Base Mailboxes and Resource Mailboxes

nzdst — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 23:21:00 GMT

Here are a couple of good training videos on how to rebase mailboxes and resource mailboxes

Mailboxes

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/02/21/435543.aspx

Resource Mailboxes

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/03/01/436164.aspx

Nick.