Daylight Saving Time gives us the opportunity to enjoy sunny summer evenings by moving our clocks an hour forward in the spring.

Yet the implementation of Daylight Saving Time has been fraught with controversy since Benjamin Franklin first conceived of the idea. Even today, regions and countries routinely change their approaches to Daylight Saving Time.

On August 8, 2005, President George W. Bush signed the Energy Policy Act of 2005. This Act changed the time change dates for Daylight Saving Time (DST) in the U.S. Beginning in 2007, DST will begin on the second Sunday in March and end the first Sunday in November. Canada has also decided to adopt these changes.

For the U.S. and its territories, Daylight Saving Time is NOT observed in Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Arizona. The Navajo Nation participates in the Daylight Saving Time policy, even in Arizona, due to its large size and location in three states.

In the European Union, Summer Time begins and ends at 1:00 a.m. Universal Time (Greenwich Mean Time). It begins the last Sunday in March and ends the last Sunday in October. In the EU, all time zones change at the same moment.

Source: http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/index.html

How this may affect our customers

Whether you live, work or do business with people in North America, these changes may affect your Outlook and Calendar data. We have been following this change for sometime and have made sure that all of our servers have been updated with the relevant patches. If you are a mail2web.com exchange email customer, particularly using a mobile device with your account, please refer to the information below:

According to Microsoft’s website:

If you use Windows Vista or have Automatic Updates turned on, you may not be affected by the change in daylight saving time. If you want to confirm, follow the steps in the Daylight Saving Time Update Guide on the Microsoft website.

For Windows Mobile-powered devices Users

Congress has changed the dates for Daylight Saving Time (DST) in the United States starting in 2007. Canada has adopted similar DST dates. These changes could cause clocks and Microsoft Outlook calendar appointments on Windows Mobile-powered devices to display incorrect times for March 11 – April 1, 2007 and October 28 – November 4, 2007 and again in subsequent years. You can find more information about the exact dates and potential impact in the Changes in DST section.

You can prevent these problems by installing three Microsoft files on your device and/or PC:

• Microsoft Windows Operating Systems Update
• Daylight Saving Time 2007 Update Tool
• Outlook Time Zone Update Tool

For all the details click here

For BlackBerry Users

The standard dates for North American Daylight Saving Time (DST) change in March 2007. The device clocks in your BlackBerry® device will NOT update automatically when the DST date changes. Click here to learn more and to update your device now.

Unless patches are applied for impacted BlackBerry software and third party software (eg: for Microsoft® Windows click here) BlackBerry device clocks will not update to the new time zones when DST dates change. As a result, your BlackBerry device may not display correct time zone information

• Between the second Sunday in March and the first Sunday in April (for example, 11 March 2007 to 1 April 2007)
• Between the last Sunday in October and the first Sunday in November (for example, 28 October 2007 to 4 November 2007)

For Calendar Users

The events in your calendar may also need to be updated for this change.

Calendar items are created in Outlook by using Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) format. UTC is an international standard 24-hour timekeeping system. Time zone information for Outlook is obtained from the Windows operating system in which the calendar items are created and is obtained at the time that the calendar items are created.

For example, an 8:00 A.M. appointment on March 1, 2007 in Redmond, Washington is stored in Outlook as UTC 4:00 P.M. In this case, DST has not yet started, and Redmond time is eight hours behind UTC.

When an update is applied to the Windows operating system to accommodate the new DST definitions, the computer’s local time is changed to the extended DST time. However, the UTC is not adjusted when the local time on the computer is adjusted. Therefore, calendar items that are added to Outlook during the extended DST period are off by one hour.

For Outlook users there is a Time Zone Update tool to assist you with correcting the time of your appointments. For more information about Outlook and the changes to DST click here.

How to manually update calendar items

The Time Zone Data Update Tool is intended to automate the update process. However, users do not have to run the tool in order to update their calendar items. You can manually correct the times on these items during the extended DST period. This may be a good strategy for users who meet these specific requirements:

• The users have recurring items that have exceptions before the extended DST period, and the past exceptions must be saved.
• The users have many items in the extended DST period that were created by using DST 2006 rules, and have other items that were created by using DST 2007 rules.
• The users want to maintain complete control over every item that must be changed in the extended DST period.
• The users have run the Time Zone Data Update Tool. However, the tool did not update a given item that the users now want to update manually.
• This also applies to users who only access there calendar from the OWA such as mail2web LIVE and Personal users.

To manually change your calendar, follow these steps:

1. Print a copy of your calendar during the extended DST period for reference.
2. Manually move meetings that you organized to the correct time.
3. Send an update for the meeting that you moved to all attendees so that the attendees’ calendar reflects the correct time.
4. Manually move all single-instance appointments.
5. Manually move all recurring appointments within the extended DST period. If you are prompted, move only the occurrence(s) that fall in the extended DST period. The instances that occur before and after the DST period should already reflect the correct time.

Thanks,

Stephen Nichols
Marketing Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com ~ 3 Comments

Microsoft has released the next group of Templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. The latest group are different from those released at the end of last month. The new templates offer additional functionality and can still be used to create a sub site. For more background on what templates are you can read my earlier post.

What makes this update more important is that we have added the option to select the template solution that is applied to the main site. Because the template needs to be applied as part of site creation it cannot be changed later. I think this will make our On Demand Business Solutions a more useful application for our customers. For example you can now create a site like blog.mydomain.com and choose the blog template for the main site. Or you can signup for a Project Tracking Workspace and with Outlook 2007 you can access the Calendar, Tasks and Documents offline. 

Here are the new templates that are now available for site creation:

Absence Request and Vacation Schedule Management
Budgeting and Tracking Multiple Projects
Bug Database
Call Center
Change Request Management
Compliance Process Support Site
Contacts Management
Document Library and Review
Event Planning
Expense Reimbursement and Approval
Help Desk
IT Team Workspace
Job Requisition and Interview Management
Knowledge Base
Physical Asset Tracking and Management
Project Tracking Workspace

The following built in templates are also available for site creation:

Team Work Site
Blank Site
Document Workspace Site
Wiki Site
Blog Site
Basic Meeting
Blank Meeting
Decision Meeting
Social Meeting
Multipage Meeting

Microsoft has said that they may introduce additional templates in the future. There is also some plans to offer mail2web.com custom templates.

MIPS Technologies Inc. president and CEO John Bourgoin summed it up perfectly: It’s not about the next killer app, he said, it’s about the next “killer experience.”

People want a killer experience on demand, any time, any place. That is what we aim to offer with our On Demand Business Solutions. Built on the latest Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services platform to provide a secure, integrated solution that can be deployed, managed and accessed directly and quickly. We add the service to the software with on demand account creation and 24/7 support.

But like I said last time, don’t take my word for it check it out for yourself. Signup for a free 30 day trial account and find out what the buzz is about.

Thanks,

Stephen Nichols
Marketing Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com ~ 3 Comments

After nine years of development, Microsoft recently announced that it will be discontinuing FrontPage. I’ll explain what discontinuing means in a second but I want to make it absolutely clear that myhosting.com will continue to support sites developed and maintained with this application as long as possible.

All Microsoft is doing is stopping any new development of FrontPage and has apparently used the code base to develop two new products: SharePoint Designer and Expressions Web.

Office SharePoint Designer 2007 is quite unique in that you can use this tool to design Office SharePoint version 3 sites as well as develop some pretty sophisticated work flows. While you could use FrontPage to connect to a SharePoint version 2 site, you can not connect to a SharePoint version 3 site using FrontPage. For this you must use the inline design capabilities or use SharePoint Designer.

Expression Web boasts some pretty decent features including the ability to develop sites for today’s standards including XHTML, CSS and XML (important for producing consistent results in various browsers as well being more compliant for indexing by some search engines). There’s also support for ASP.NET 2.0 and it is compatible with Visual Studio (good for a designer working in conjunction with developers).

For most website owners, who aren’t developers and don’t manage any SharePoint sites, there’s no need to upgrade. As it is, FrontPage is one of the only web design tools that requires server side extensions to power a bunch features like the web search component. While these extensions are supported on current Windows web servers (2003), they will not work with the next server release from Microsoft – the elusive Longhorn.

And while there is no official release date for Longhorn, when it is eventually released, myhosting.com plans to maintain our current servers for customers who require this functionality, and continue to support FrontPage customers as long as there is support from Microsoft for the core operating system.

That should be good for several more years but eventually you might want to consider a new tool for designing and maintaining your site. Expressions Web is one choice but there are some great, mature tools in the market that can be used on any platform. Try out Dreamweaver or GoLive by Adobe. But we recommend avoiding Flash if being found in the popular search engines is a major consideration for you.

Good or bad, current web design standards are being driven by search engine optimization (SEO) considerations and Flash just isn’t SEO friendly.

John Carthy
V.P. Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com, myhosting.com ~ 6 Comments

Microsoft has released the first 20 templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. These are more than the name implies, a better name would be “solutions” or “online applications”. To better understand how these work and how they can be used first I need to explain a little of how SharePoint works.

The site you see is the User Interface for a group of lists and libraries stored in a secure data base. Each page within SharePoint contains web-parts that can display sorted and filtered information from the data base. These can be as simple as contacts, tasks or blog entries or as complex as a project dashboard for a new store opening.

So what about these templates? Each template is a set of lists, libraries and web-parts that work together to provide a functional and customizable solution. For example the Board of Directors application template provides a single location for an external group of members to store and locate common documents such as quarterly reviews, shareholder meeting notes and annual strategy documents. The Business Performance Reporting application template helps organization managers track the satisfaction of customers through a combination of surveys and discussions.

WSS 3.0 supports two types of these templates, one that must be installed on the server, and the other the site owner can upload to their site. The templates Microsoft released are the variety that need to be installed on each site. We have gone one step better and configured our installation so that all 20 are preinstalled for you. These are in addition to the 6 included with the core of SharePoint; Team Site, Blank Site, Document Workspace, Wiki Site, Blog and Meeting Workspaces.

Here is a list of the new solutions that you can access today for any WSS 3.0 site from mail2web.com:

Board of Directors

Business Performance Management

Competitive Analysis Site

Case Management

Competitive Analysis Subsite

Classroom Management

Clinical Trial Initiation

Dispute Invoice Management System

Discussion Database

Employee Activities Site

Employee Benefits

Equity Research

Integrated Marketing Campaign

Manufacturing Process Management

Marketing and Product Requirements

New Store Opening

Request for Proposal v3

Sports League

Team Room

Time Tracking

Employee Training Scheduling and Materials

Together this provides the site owner with the ability to create a portal to store, track, update and share information. To use these templates the site owner creates a new site or workspace selecting the template during the process.

Ultimately we will expand our offering for SharePoint 3.0 and enable users to create new sites with a choice templates. This is dependant on Microsoft’s release of the server admin templates, scheduled for later this month.

But don’t take my word for it; check it out for yourself. Signup for a free 30 day trial account and find out what the buzz is about.

Thanks,

Stephen Nichols
Marketing Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com ~ 1 Comment