Troubleshooting tips for users and FAQ for the Microsoft Calendar DST update tool

Gentle Reader,

Miss Meeting Manners received the following FAQ from our absolutely most knowledgeable and capable client, Nancy from Qualcomm. A soul intrepid beyond imagining she has undertaken this weekend to update all of her 10,000+ Exchange users with the Microsoft DST patches. She sent us this FAQ and invited us to share it with others in the same situation as she is. If you use it please credit her, she deserves it.


Why am I getting spammed with calendar items? Can I delete them all?
Since Outlook uses email to manage calendar updates, the only way to update a meeting and fix the time is to send out the change to all the invitees. Unfortunately the tool does not differentiate between Accepts and Declines so even if you declined the meeting before you will once again have the opportunity to decline the update again. Updates are ONLY going out for meetings that fall between 3/11 and 3/31. It is NOT for every single meeting on your calendar.

What order should a user accept the meetings in?
Accept them in the same order that you would normally. Generally we recommend from oldest to newest, deleting the items that show up as “Out of Date”. Since the Calendar update tool will only be sending 1 update out for each meeting – you should not run into any issues with conflicting updates to the same meeting

My meetings are showing up in a different time zone!
This may happen if the tool has incorrectly determined what time zone your calendar should be in. Contact your Exchange Administrator with the name of the user, what time zone their meetings SHOULD be in – and they can do a one off adjustment if necessary. If the user does not want to wait for a ticket to be escalated – the Help Desk should be able to walk them through running the Outlook Time zone tool – more info located here : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931667/en-us

Some of my meetings did not get updated- what do I do now?
While we do our best to identify every affected meeting there may be instances where a meeting is missed. Have the user wait until after their Windows machine is patched point – then all they will need to do to fix the meeting is send out an update, moving the meeting to the correct time if necessary. The update will put the meeting back onto their calendar at the corrected time.

Some of my meetings that I created over the weekend were moved back an hour and they shouldn’t have been!
The tool is unable to differentiate between meetings that have the right DST stamp and the wrong DST stamp. We are trying to minimize the number of “good” meetings that get moved by the tool by running it over the weekend and warning people not to create new meetings until Monday. If a user finds a good meeting was moved – please help them send out an update and move it back to the corrected time.

How do I know my meetings are OK?
Put the time of the meeting into the subject. This gives your invitees a very easy way to determine what time the meeting is supposed to be at – even if there are DST display problems.

Now that my meetings have been “fixed” - there is a double booking with the conference room – what do I do now?
We will be running reports before and after the tool is run to identify any double booking problems that may be caused and will assist users to resolve them on a case by case basis in the week after, well before the actual DST change.