Time problem

[JBO]

Hello,

We have been having time issues ever since the govt changed the daylight
savings time dates. We applied all of the patches, but the first year we
still had some issues, primarily with Outlook Calendaring. We ran the time
zone tools on the Outlook clients that had issues. Every time change it
gets a bit worse.



Currently, after a lot of trial and error, we have our domain controller
(Windows Serve 2003) and our email server (same, with Exchange 2003), set to
the correct time with the "adjust to daylight savings time" switched off.
We had problems when it was selected. Our clients are set the same. Our
scheduling between our employees is correct, but when we send or receive
email to or from the outside world, it is often off by one hour. The same
with appointments sent outside of the domain.



Can anyone give me some advice on the following?



If I set the domain controller to adjust for daylight savings time, and have
reference in my login scripts to sync using w32tm, should the clients be set
for "adjust to daylight saving time" also, or does it grab the adjusted time
from the dc? How about the other servers? I have one other dc and several
members.



Thanks in advance for any advice!



JBO

 

[neo [mvp outlook]]

Not really an Outlook question but I'll be happy to share my opinions about
this....

1) All time operations are computed from UTC/GMT. By this I mean that the
operating system/programs work together in essence where items are stamped
with UTC time + the time zone information. This is what allows another
system in a different time zone to correctly adjust the display of
date/time.

2) Do you know if the recipients of said items/messages outside your
organization have taken the same steps as you to apply the correct time zone
updates to their systems? (This one is huge because you would be surprised
how many forget to stay on top of this.)

3) I never recommend turning off the automatically adjust time zone setting
since all the systems I support are in a zone where there are time changes.
Not sure what I would do in regards to a location that didn't go thru this,
but I would most likely stay the course and say keep it on considering that
no place is an island when it comes to electronic communications.

I think I answered all your questions that it is best left on and that your
systems are smart enough to handle the adjustments since everything gets
computed from UTC/GMT at one point or another.