WADST: Exchange Patch Coming

A concerned IT Professional contacted me today. He expressed concern that WA customers were feeling the pain of our lack of WA DST (CDO) patches for Exchange Server.

For those of you that arent aware, though for those in WA Im sure you are, Exchange calendar appointments being sent outside your organisation and received by another Exchange Server in another company will show the appointment an hour different to what you intended it to be. This only affects meeting requests sent outside your organisation, not within it.

The fault is due to Exchange maintaining its own internal table of DST and general timezone information - theres nothing you can do about it and certainly theres nothing that IT Professionals can do about it! Whats required is a patch from us to alter the internal table that Exchange holds about DST information. We promised this patch on the web by the middle of this month and Im sure youre aware that its not ready yet. The news Ive heard from the Exchange team is that they are well aware of the pain this is causing and are working on a patch for it. Again we can only apologise for the delay on it. Please feel free to let your customers know that it is an issue we're aware of and that it requires a patch from us to fix it. Aside from providing guidance to employees around careful appointment setting at present when sending external appointments thats all that can be done until the patch is released. Our apologies.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  It's been quiet on my blog this week because I have been in Seattle for the twice yearly Geek-fest that

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  CDO is involved in a number of areas including extensibility where developers have built custom solutions against it. Time is a core part of that and any application that depends on DST information including Exchange's internal stuff such as calendar appointments and Auto Accept event sinks to work. In short this patch will address this kind of stuff aswell.

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
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• Anonymous
  February 12, 2007
  You state that the CDO patch is for externally sent calendar items. However I thought it affect other applications using CDO. For example, we use the Auto Accept Agent under Exchange 2003, which is an event sink from Microsoft for resource type calendars. For the past few months we have had to deal with the pain, again and again, of meeting requests with resources (meeting rooms) being out of phase with the users going to the meeting. We have been waiting, impatiently, for the CDO patch to be released. No I'm worried it won't fix the auto accept agent issues. What needs to happen to get the auto accept agent working correctly with DST?