Bulletin: March 2, 2007

Earlier Date for Daylight Saving Time

By: TechComm Services Manager

Daylight Saving Time (DST) will begin on March 11 this year—three weeks earlier than in the past. Congress approved the earlier date in the U.S. Energy Policy Act of 2005, effective in 2007. You will have to change your clocks earlier this year, but you may not have thought of other ramifications of the change.

Most PCs, servers, and software applications are programmed to automatically change to DST. Unless a device is relatively new or has been updated, it might not switch to DST until April 1. The same problem will occur again in the fall, when DST ends one week later on November 4, 2007.

Quadax does not anticipate any disruption to our services as a result of this change. We have developed a strategy to implement the new DST dates in our internal systems and applications. We strongly recommend that our clients assess the impact of the date change on their systems and actively address the issue. Clients are responsible for time adjustments on PCs, servers, and networks in their own offices.

Most software vendors whose products are affected by the new DST dates have patches or upgrades to correct them. Xpeditor, HARP, and QuadMax/OnBase document management applications do not require any additional software patches. These products do not measure time themselves, but rather may rely on the system clock to initiate scheduled events. If your system clock does not reflect the correct time, scheduled events may not occur at the time you expect. 

Microsoft has additional information about the impact of DST at http://support.microsoft.com/gp/dst_topissues and an update guide at http://support.microsoft.com/gp/cp_dst. Hewlett-Packard (HP) has more information about their products at http://h10072.www1.hp.com/dst.

Check with your vendor if you use other products.