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Daylight Savings Time Update
Overview
The Enterprise Client
Management group has created a strategy using
SMS packages to deal with the changes to
Daylight Savings Time (DST) mandated by the
Energy Policy Act of August 2005.
The strategy entails two approaches:
interactive or silent.
The interactive approach is designed to
be advertised to workstations, but not by
mandatory assignment.
This allows the user to control the
timing of the installation of the 2007 Time Zone
Update for Microsoft Windows operating systems
and the Time Zone Data Update Tool, and run the
tool interactively, so the user may determine
which affected appointments to update.
The silent approach is designed to permit
the SMS administrator to deploy the update and
tool, and run the tool for the logged-in user’s
Outlook profile silently in the background.
Interactive
Both approaches employ
separate packages to install the 2007 Time Zone
Update (KB928388) and the Time Zone Data Update
Tool.
There are specifically designed programs
within each package for the interactive and
silent installations.
To use the interactive installation, SMS
admins need only to create an advertisement
targeting the systems they want to update, and
select the package
Public –
Time Zone Data Update Tool for Microsoft Outlook
and the program
Time
Zone Data Update Tool – interactive.
That will first run the program
DST 2007
Update (prog. bar).
This program installs the update in
passive mode, meaning that a progress bar will
be displayed to the user.
The
Time
Zone Data Update Tool – preinstall (GUI)
will run next, installing the tool, and again
displaying a progress bar to the user.
Once installed, the tool will launch so
the user can update any meetings he/she has
created within the three weeks affected by the
new Daylight Savings Time schedule.
This advertisement should
be published to the workstations—that is, not
advertised through a mandatory assignment.
These programs are configured to run only
when a user is logged in to the workstation.
Users will be prompted to install the
update and tool by a balloon message from the
System Tray.
They can either click that, opening the
Run Advertised Programs applet or they can
choose to install the update manually from the
Run Advertised Programs applet or the Add/Remove
Programs applet in the Control Panel at a later
time.
The reason for displaying the progress
bars is so that the users will see that the
installation is occurring after they initiate
it.
The process can take up to a full minute before
the tool is launched, and that seemed too long
to leave users staring at the screen with
nothing to indicate the program was running.
The advantage to the
interactive approach is that the user controls
when the update occurs and what meetings or
appointments will be addressed.
Additionally, the program remains
available to the user from either Control Panel
applet for correcting other Outlook profiles
she/he may have (e.g. – a generic or
departmental Outlook account that the user is
responsible for checking) or running again at a
later time to move new meetings that he/she
created from an unpatched workstation after the
tool was first run.
Silent
To use the silent
installation, SMS admins need to create an
advertisement targeting the systems they want to
update, and select the package
Public –
Time Zone Data Update Tool for Microsoft Outlook
and the program
Time
Zone Data Update Tool – silent.
Again, the program will first run the
program
DST 2007 Update (silent), to install the
update for Windows XP.
Then the
Time
Zone Data Update Tool – preinstall (silent)
will run, installing the tool silently.
The tool will then launch and run
silently, moving any affected meetings and
appointments in the logged-in user’s Outlook
profile.
This advertisement can be
done through mandatory assignment, since
everything runs silently and the programs
installing the update and tool will run whether
a user is logged in or not.
The tool will not run until a user is
logged in, however, since it runs against the
default Outlook profile of the logged-in user.
If this is advertised to a workstation
that is shared between multiple users, the tool
will run once for each different user who logs
in.
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