In 2005, Congress passed a bill mandating that daylight-saving time occur three weeks earlier each year until 2010. Although the time change has been called a "mini-Y2K because it crept up on [unprepared computer technicians]," the University's computing systems did not suffer any "big crashes," according to Lauren McSwain-Starrett, public relations and marketing specialist in the Information Technology and Communication Office.
According to Michael McPherson, deputy chief information officer of ITC, the office's system administrators "put a lot of effort to applying patches to make [the] time change correctly [on University servers]."
McPherson added that while potential complications were not a major concern, the administrators were worried that they may miss something causing a server to work improperly; however, there were no glitches and everything went smoothly.
Will Martin, computer systems engineer of ITC, stated that the transition also went smoothly because both "Windows and Macs had fixes that updated without [computer users] knowing."
Although Windows and Macs users have not reported any major problems thus far, McSwain-Starrett said users of Oracle Calendar, formally known as Corporate Time, would definitely find that a "number of entries are incorrect if they were booked anytime before Feb. 24, when a patch was installed to fix [any] problems."
Moving up the date of daylight-saving time may not be a permanent change. Congress will reassess the bill in the future to determine if the practice of an earlier time change should be continued, according to McSwain-Starrett.
If the bill is not kept, McSwain-Starrett said she predicted changing daylight-saving time back to April will cause similar problems.
-- compiled by Ashley Woodard
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