The new daylight savings time (US2007DST) enacted by the U.S. Energy Policy Act of 2005 has caused a lot of confusion regarding software applications. The Witness Quality Monitor (QM) and Quality (QCM) Server Microsoft based Windows products pull their dates and times from the operating system and therefore do not require any specific Witness patches.
The Witness applications get their date/time functions input from the local time set on the PC Operating System. If this time is set incorrectly, this in turn will cause this incorrect time to be passed on to the various Witness applications and used incorrectly.
From a Microsoft Windows Operating System environment perspective (Servers and Clients), there are two concerns – OS patch and Sun Java patch. Following is a brief discussion of these two concerns:
1) The Microsoft Help and Support website specifically discusses their various recommendations for the Microsoft based operating systems and applications. A good starting point, to begin your planning as well as the various recommendations made by Microsoft can be found in the Microsoft KB document:
“Preparing for Daylight Saving Time Changes in 2007”
The Microsoft web browser url for this KB article:
http://support.microsoft.com/gp/dst_topissues
The url to install the Daylight Savings Time patches for the Microsoft Windows 2003 and Windows XP Operating Systems can be found at:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929120
2) Additionally many of the newer Witness applications get their date and time from the Sun Microsystems Java Runtime Environment (JRE). The Witness products, which utilize the Sun JRE, are noted later in this document.
To locate and download the versions of the Java Runtime Environment from Sun Microsystems, you can find these at the following web page (J2RE – 1.4 or JRE – 1.5):
http://java.sun.com/products/archive/index.html
