Asynchronous DST Update Breaks Calendar

[Jerry Baker]

I updated my Windows back when the update came out, but most of the
other people in my company did not. The other, unupdated, people were
creating and sending me appointments. My computer was scheduling them
with the DST update while their computers were not yet updated. This
caused a meeting scheduled for March 12 at 8:30am to appear on my
calendar at 9:30am (the organizer wasn't updated and I was).
Consequently, Outlook thinks all of the appointments in my calendar are
correct when, in fact, they are all incorrect. I can move all of the
appointments in my calendar without issue, but the problem is that when
I look at my boss' calendar I see everything an hour off as well. When
my boss looks at their calendar from their machine the appointments are
correct. I can't just change my boss' appointments because that will
make theirs incorrect. How do I address this?

 

[Jerry Baker]

Here's an example:

I have a recurring appointment that was created back on February 27,
2007 that reads like this,

Occurs every Friday effective 3/9/2007 until 6/25/2007 from 8:30 AM to
10:00 AM (GMT-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada); Tijuana.

This appointment shows on my calendar at 9:30am this Friday. The Outlook
update tool does not change it, or any other appointment.

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

Did he apply the update yet and fix his appointments using tzmover? Until
both computers are using the same zone info, you'll see his in your time.

 

[Jerry Baker]

Did he apply the update yet and fix his appointments using tzmover? Until
both computers are using the same zone info, you'll see his in your time.

Yes, my boss's computer was updated last Friday.

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

did he fix his appointments too?

 

[Jerry Baker]

did he fix his appointments too?

We ran the tzmove tool on everyone's computer.

 

[Guest]

Jerry,
We have someone with the exact same issue (see message below yours). We are
out of updates to run on the computers. For some reason he sees the other
person's free/busy time as an hour ahead when their calendar is actually
correct.
If you get this figured out I would love to hear the reasoning.

 

[Jerry Baker]

Jerry,
We have someone with the exact same issue (see message below yours). We are
out of updates to run on the computers. For some reason he sees the other
person's free/busy time as an hour ahead when their calendar is actually
correct.
If you get this figured out I would love to hear the reasoning.

I didn't figure it out, but I discovered that the person seeing their
appointment times correctly actually hadn't updated their machine. They
had just manually set the clock an hour ahead. As soon as we applied the
update all of their appointments were then an hour ahead of where they
should be. When we ran the tzmove tool it reported that there was
nothing to change and closed. This is on the machine that was used to
create all of the appointments. I give up. We're just going to have to
live with chaos for the next three weeks and look for another calendar
application to protect ourselves from this kind of unreliability in the
future.

The main problem seems to be that the tzmove tool doesn't work. I have
tried to run it on three machines in the office and it has not worked
properly on any of them. On one machine it reported that there were
three appointments to change even though there were at least one
hundred. The rest of the machines reported nothing at all to change.

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

in the new tz field did you choose the (update) entry? it's preselected in
each case I used it but a few people who reported it didn't work said it did
once they selected the updated tz.

 

[Jerry Baker]

in the new tz field did you choose the (update) entry? it's preselected in
each case I used it but a few people who reported it didn't work said it did
once they selected the updated tz.

It was already selected, I did not try actually clicking on the listbox
to reselect it.

 

[Jerry Baker]

It was already selected, I did not try actually clicking on the listbox
to reselect it.

That doesn't help. I think I know what the problem is. The only machine
where it worked at all was a Windows 2000 machine where I had not
changed the name of the timezone with tzedit. The tzmove tool asks you
to move appointments created in X timezone to Y timezone. The problem is
that after you update the original timezone in which the appointments
were created no longer exists, so nothing is flagged for change.

I tried moving all of my appointments to a wacky timezone like GMT and
it still reported nothing to move.

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

I bet you are right. Others told me they used a 3rd party TZ fix and had
several issues - both general to windows and also for outlook - so they
applied the official patch and everything worked as expected.

 

[Jerry Baker]

I bet you are right. Others told me they used a 3rd party TZ fix and had
several issues - both general to windows and also for outlook - so they
applied the official patch and everything worked as expected.

Except I am talking about the official patch not functioning.