Indiana DST problems (Windows) summarized

Please be aware of the potential disruption to calendars caused by Indiana's switch to observing Daylight Saving Time on the morning of April 2nd. IT Staff across campus have been struggling with the severity of the impact to normal operations for some time now. From tests run by several departmental IT staff as well as central ITaP staff, we have collected the observations listed below:

A. Who this affects, and Symptoms of the problem:

* Appointments created for the time period between April and October (while the machine is still in Indiana time (pre-DST)) will show up as having a one-hour offset once the computer is updated to observing DST. Appointments made AFTER the machine's time is set to Eastern time ARE CORRECT. Appointments made FROM machines which observe DST ARE CORRECT.

* Some recurring appointments show up correctly, but some do not: This is because of the time of year they were created. All should be treated as incorrect.

B. Non-solutions (Things that Campus IT organizations have tried and do not work):

* Exporting the calendar to a comma-separated-value file (CSV), and re-importing after changing the time: This preserves the "correctness" of the time, but strips out all extraneous information such as invitees, attendees, recurrences, etc. For instance, a recurring appointment is converted into a series of single appointments.

* Updating calendar items automatically: Since appointments are dependent on the local time of the actual event, updating all events will cause appointments between Indiana and Non-Indiana users to be INCORRECT. Automated solutions cannot decide the location of the event for you, only you have that information. It is our opinion that ANY automated solution could make calendar-related problems significantly worse and should be avoided.

C. ECN's recommendations to minimize havoc created by incorrect appointment times: (Please note that these are not "fixes", but ways to help you deal with this issue)

and from the Print Style select Weekly Style. Use a Start date of 4/1/2006 and an End date of 10/31/2006. This is just a safety measure.

* Go through your calendar. As you see calendar items that you recognize and can be sure of, ensure the correct time, Click on the subject line, add the ACTUAL CORRECT TIME to the subject, save and close them.

* Opening All-Day items that incorrectly span two days, update the time, and clicking "Save and Close", updates the time stamp, and makes it CORRECT again.

* If you notice appointments for events OUTSIDE of Indiana, be doubly aware of what the time of the appointment should be, and update appropriately.

D. Summary:

This is an extremely complicated issue that does NOT have an easy solution. We (ALL of campus IT) are still trying to come up with something that might mitigate this situation, but as of right now, things do not look very good. Please be patient, since every person in the state of Indiana is going through the same process. Please understand that we are all in this together and we all must review our calendars carefully.  This is not a failing of ECN or ITaP.  It is a situation that was not taken into account in the design of some calendaring systems.  These comments are summarized and will be updated as we information is available at:

https://engineering.purdue.edu/ECN/KB/DST

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Updated 3/16/2006

Indiana University has provided the following documents on this topic that might be useful:

• How does Indiana's adoption of Daylight Saving Time affect my Exchange calendar?