DST: Almost a nonevent for me

I spent a good deal of time planning and patching for DST. The worst part was trying to figure out exactly what needed to be done to make Outlook, Exchange and Blackberry Enterprise Server play nice together and not mess up calendar items.

All went well except for a couple of small issues.

• Some of my laptop users who are on the road often didn't get the windows patch pushed to them.
  
• Something didn't go right with the Exchange Mailbox tool so some users have a 3 week period between 3/11 and 4/1 where the appointments that were already on the calendar show up an hour early.
  
• The CEO's new Blackberry Pearl was all messed up. Too many issues to outline. I had to erase the Pearl and delete his account on the BES server to get it to work properly. Spent 2 3/4 hours on the phone with Cingular and RIM. All but 25 minutes of that was on hold. 2 hours on hold with RIM alone.
  

All in all it wasn't too bad. At least my Sunday was peaceful.

I do have a couple of comments and questions for vendors.

1. Why wasn't this dealt with in code long before this year? Many vendors issued patches in Jan or Feb of this year.
   
2. Why wasn't the NEW Blackberry Pearl already compliant? It hasn't been out that long and we've know about the time change for 2 years.
3. Why did I receive emails from 3 vendors on Friday 3/9/07 telling me to make sure that their applications would work properly? Why wasn't this email sent several weeks ago? Did they just get the word that time changed early this year? What did they expect me to do at the last moment? I guess the assumed that I would be working over the weekend to make sure everything was ready so what's a few more apps to worry about.

Many vendors are suffering from poor customer service relations already and I don't think many of them did anything to improve their image. They had a big opportunity to make this a non-event for IT by making it a priority starting 2 years ago instead of waiting until the last minute.