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After several emails that have come across the various NTEN and nonprofit email lists about the changes to Daylight Savings Time (DST) this year, I thought it would be a good idea for us to have a look at the specific impact to Beaconfire. For those needing some context on what I’m talking about, this year there is a new law that affects when DST is observed (3 weeks earlier than before). The best summary of this issue for nonprofits was penned by Gavin Claybaugh at the Mott Foundation on the NTEN Discussion List.

Most of the issues with the change relate to updates to the operating system software (Windows, linux, etc) that normally manage this change automatically. Other systems affected include email and calendaring tools like Microsoft Exchange and Blackberry servers. Here’s a handy list of vendors and their patches, statements or positions.

Rather than try to cover all the tools or vendors affected, I want to share our experience which may be useful for others.

So far, (knock wood) it doesn’t look like we’ll have to do very much at all to prepare for the change. This isn’t because there aren’t things to do but in this case we are lucky that others will do the legwork. Beaconfire outsources the vast majority of its IT infrastructure and support to mindSHIFT who manages our laptops, desktops and core servers through autmoated and remote management tools. They’ll take care that all the key patches are applied and all we have to do is leave our computers connected to receive the udpates.

As for our clients Web sites and applications, nearly all of them are hosted at third party facilities. In our discussions with those hosting vendors, they have either already patched their servers or have processes in place that will take care of this without any real impact. The main thing it looks like we’ll need to do is update any applications that use a Java Virtual Machine.
There are many reasons why outsourcing your technolgy and hosting infrastructure may not be right for you, but it is times like this that demonstrate why outsourcing can work. Let the experts deal with these once in while issues and stay focused on your business. I’m glad this is a path we’ve taken for ourselves and that made sense for a number of our clients.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 at 2:36 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.