As discussed in our Xeda Admin meeting this morning, I wanted to update everyone on the progress and status of the DST 2007 efforts within Xeda:

• All Microsoft Windows 2003 OS and Exchange 2003 patches were successfully applied last Tuesday & Friday in our Test & Production Forests, respectively.  These patches prepared the servers to recognize March 11th as the start of DST for 2007, instead of the old standard, the first Sunday in April.  This time period, along with the first week in November, 2007 is known as the "extended DST period".  These patches also were a prerequisite for updating individual calendars.
• Although the servers will now recognize the extended DST period, Outlook/Entrouage/OWA calendars will incorrectly display meeting events during the extended DST period, until either a tool is ran locally for each email/calendar user or centrally against the Exchange servers.
• For updating calendars on individual mailboxes, we decided to centrally run the Exchange Calendar Update Tool (ECUT), to adjust the calendar event times for the extended DST time periods.  This will ease the burden of the technical folks throughout the Xeda organization.  
• The Exchange Calendar Update Tool was ran in the Test Forest today.  Precise prerequisites had to be met and a number of manual settings needed proper pre-configurations before running the ECUT tool.  Although, the results seemed positive, as the 5 mailboxes I tested had all updated properly, we have to be mindful this is a Test Forest with very limited calendar items.  The total time for this took approx. 45 minutes.  If you have a mailbox presence in the Test Forest, please check the extended DST time periods and report your results, if you can.
• The ECUT tool has some drawbacks.   It is reported the tool can take hours or even days to complete in a Production environment. It will run in single-threaded mode only and only against a single server.  This was not a huge issue in our Test Forest which has a single Virtual Exchange server (TVEXBE1) and only a handful of calendar events.  Running this in our Production Forest with two Virtual Exchange Servers and extensive calendar items will present challenges.  The tool will have to be run either in parallel, using another precisely tuned system, or in series...which could take a VERY long to complete. 

The suggested time to run the tool is non-peak times.  We should run this ECUT tool sooner than later, as any calendar bookings which have occurred since the OS/Exchange patches until the tool is ran in Production will be skewed by an hour.  I suggest starting the process early Saturday after the full backups of the Exchange Information Store have occurred.  If there are no objections, I will proceed with this plan.  An email correspondence to the techncial folks, adtechs@ucdavis.edu, will be sent soon detailing this as well.
One final note:  Although the purpose of changing the DST was to "save energy",  I believe the exhaustive energy spent by IT departments across the US will have consumed more energy than the end savings realized.  :-|

Please send any additional questions to adhelp@ucdavis.edu.

Regards,

Paul Singh
IET - Data Center & Client Services
University of California, Davis
pasingh@ucdavis.edu
(530) 752-8809