Blog Entry

Just a reminder to you all about next year's timezone changes. This affects anyone that's in the US, does business with the US, travels to the US, has heard of the US - well, you get the picture. Daylight Savings Time (DST) is going to be starting 3 weeks earlier and ending a week later in most US and Canadian timezones next year, so you all need to take steps to make sure that you have an easy transition.Dean Lythgoe and 2 members of his team Kent Sievers and Craig Johnson have been working hard to create an advisory for all GroupWise customers, however, it contains information relevent to everyone. NTS has converted the advisory into a TID and you can read it here.

In short, make sure all your timezone defintions are correct on servers, workstations and in GroupWise and install the WebAccess updates that will be following soon. Don't look right now, because we didn't release them yet, but we should be releasing a public beta of GW7 SP2 and a GroupWise 6.5 update, probably next week. At least that's the current plan unless someting-very-bad happens.

The WebAccess fix is going to contain two changes. The first is an update to hard coded timezones (in fact, it's the removal of hard coded timezones and using the ones in the domain instead), and the second is a timezone detection routine that will update WebAccess sessions to use the timezone of the workstation that users are logging in from.

I need to check on GWIA as anecdotal evidence suggests that it also contains hardcoded timezone information that will break iCal appointments - so I'll post an update here later.

[edit] Yes, you do need a new GWIA too.  This will be fixed in the 7.x codebase only as iCal wasn't supported in 6.5.  Only affects iCal appointments.

You should make your updates shortly after November 5 this year. We cannot stress enough the importance of your being on top of this to ensure next year's transition is a smooth and as pain free as possible.

And in the words of a great Alabama native "That's all I have to say about that".