Monday, March 9, 2009

Outlook appointments off by an hour after daylight savings

Since originally posting this, I figured out something else that helps fix the issue in Outlook 2007. I had a user who had some recurring appointments showing up an hour later than they were supposed to be, but others were appearing correctly. The one thing I noticed about the incorrect appointments is that when I opened the series, it appeared to have time zone information attached, and the Time Zones button appeared as if it was selected in the toolbar. It wouldn't let me click on it to deactivate, but if I click on Recurrence, then clicked OK to get back out without changing anything, the appointment fixed itself. It seems like an odd solution, but it also worked so I can't really complain, and it also deactivated the Time Zones button. If you're looking to mass update your calendar, go ahead and continue to the rest of the post, but the issue causing that type of problem was supposedly handled a while back by a Microsoft update, so you may want to double-check those on your machine as well.

Did you show up to work today to find appointments were off by an hour after the daylight savings change over the weekend? Or maybe it's just your recurring appointments, which seems to be the problem my users are having. I originally went through the DST update for Exchange back when the original start and end dates were changed, but apparently there are still some leftover details to deal with. Luckily Microsoft provides a handy utility for quickly updating appointments. There's also an advanced section which allows you to select to only update recurring appointments. You can download direct from Microsoft at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=27BB0EE2-03AC-4E5B-AEC5-3E878490FCE1&displaylang=en. Follow the directions to update your calendar to reflect the correct time for your time zone.

If you're an Outlook 2007 user, it actually has an appointment update feature included. You can find it by opening Outlook, then going to Tools->Options, then under the Preferences tab, go to Calendar options, then Time Zones... You can use this to make sure all of your appointments are set up for the correct time zone.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This still happens in 2010. Thank you for this, it has been bugging me every time daylight savings happens. My time doesn't change, but our other office in MI does and many recurring meetings from users in the other timezone end up an hour off after the shift.