For those of you in the US, you should have heard by now that daylight savings time is being extended for 2007. It starts earlier and ends later than previous years. The goal is to save energy by having longer periods of daylight during typical daylight hours. However laudable the goal, it's creating a problem for lots of PCs. The formula for daylight savings time is hardcoded into Windows XP and now it has to be changed or lots of things including your appointments, scheduled systems jobs and even your timesheet software could be off by an hour.
Daylight savings time will start this year on March 11 and end on November 4. Without the change, it would have been April 1 and October 28th.
Microsoft is releasing a series of patches for Windows (client and server), Exchange, Dynamics CRM and other apps over the next couple of weeks to fix the problem. Information on how Dynamics GP would be affected is scarce but it appears that if you've fixed Windows (and possibly Exchange) that you're fine. GP relies on the operating system's clock for time based operations so patching your system and the server seems like it should do the trick.
Usually an hour or two wouldn't break too much in a generic install but when you look at companies requiring high availability or for companies operating at the edge of the spectrum an hour can be important. If you have jobs running one right after the other for 20 hours over the weekend, an hour is a big deal.
Make sure your IT department is on top of this and you should be fine. Just to make this whole thing a lot more fun, March 11 is also the day Convergence starts. It would be nice to hear something from Microsoft that GP doesn't require anything beyond fixing Windows.
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