Way back in 2005 George Bush and his energy buddies for some weird reason decided to change the start and end of Daylight Savings Time. Who knows why they thought this would be nothing. Of more concern is why Microsoft and other vender's such as RIM (BlackBerry), Oracle etc have waited until the last minute to deal with this issue.

Microsoft had to provide three patches to get the Daylight Savings Time for the Operating Systems right. Of course they didn't release patches for 'unsupported platforms. What a co-incidence that they released Vista and Exchange 2007 at the same time. If you pay Microsoft a premium they will supply you with the patch to update Exchange 2000 that had they only bothered to release last year would not have cost you more money. I doubt there was a conspiracy or anything, just a complete lack of consideration and planning.

So the OS patch went smoothly. The Exchange update tools however were an exercise in frustration and disaster. The Outlook tool worked for individual users. This is nice if you have yourself and 10 other employees. But what to do for an Enterprise with 5,000 mailboxes, a hundred or so that utilize the Microsoft Auto Accept script? Well you use the wrapper to the Outlook tool. (say what?). So Microsoft last week started to seem to realize the depth of anger in the support community and actually started holding web casts and seminars. One of these pointed out a lot of features, of course, the fancy tool isn't out until 'this week'.

Enterprise's of course can simply wait and schedule their updates around Microsoft's priorities, NOT! (because it's not like they have big complex environments). Now, as you may expect, this implementation did not go as smoothly as one might hope. So a call was made to Microsoft. First there was the normal mention that there seemed to be an unexpected high call volume. What? Unexpected? Wow, who could have thought that. I mean, release patches at the last minute with crappy tools and you have an unexpected high call volume?! Who would have seen that coming. Now long hold times, fine, routed to the wrong group, grumble... they did help out there. So, another road block pops up. Call back. After a long time on hold (hour and a half) phone numbers are taken and a call back 'at some point in the future' is committed too. Several hours later we were forced to forge our own path, struggle through. No call back to the numbers provided.

The pain. Even though I knew the weekends effort was going to be painful, in the end, I underestimated work involved and how many hours of sleep I would miss. Not Microsoft's shining moment in any way shape or form. In all honesty, not many vender's shining moment.

Here's the kicker. Congress has reserved the right to adjust this again based on feedback. Oh please no, this was stupid to begin with, painful to implement, costly to the country. Leave it alone. Please.

I still think someone owes the support community free copies of Vista Ultimate. :)

For more information, see Microsft's site and good luck.

Active Directories Users and Computers is a basic tool of a Windows 2003 Active Directory environment. An often overlooked feature is the saved queries in ADUC. There is some information floating around but it's something I never really used much until recently. Also, getting a group membership to list is not intuitive and I had to get some help fro our friendly neighborhood resources to find out how to do that.

I was at Fry's tonight getting a replacement for my old CD Writer and overheard the question

Will I be able to schedule a backup onto this?

The gentleman in question was holding a Seagate external USB drive. The associates sort of looked around and pointed to a different box that had printed 'One touch backups'. Of course that didn't answer the question now did it?

There are far better articles by people who have spend more time explaining this then me, so I will only mention some considerations then toss in a bunch of links to those other sites.

I got this from a link off one of the Sunbelt community lists some time ago. A friend expressed interest so I thought I would put it up here for now. This was written by Martin Tuip and the original can be found here.

conversionto svg format
3 different tries at exporting them with Visio 2003