UITS tells students to prepare for DST

For the second year in a row, all Indiana residents will spring forward their clocks Sunday from 2 a.m. to 3 a.m. for daylight saving time.\nAlthough an extra hour of daylight seems encouraging toward the end of winter, there are a few technological changes students should know about.\nChuck Aikman, University Information Technology Services manager and online support technician, encourages students, faculty and staff to keep their computer software updated to ensure a smooth switch for daylight saving time.\n“Because the start and end dates for (DST) are changing this year, most computer systems and applications need to be updated to recognize the new DST information,” Aikman said. “Most operating systems will need to be updated.” \nAikman suggested reading the UITS Knowledge Base article titled “At IU, how does the 2007 change in DST start and end times affect me?”\n“As an organization, UITS has spent hundreds of hours on DST. In addition to this recent change of start-end times, it was a huge effort to gear up our systems and support services for Indiana’s adoption of DST in 2006,” Aikman said. “This entailed research, testing, partnering with peer institutions and working with vendors. We also launched a huge communication campaign focused on documentation, information sharing and electronic communications.”\nCell phones, BlackBerries and Palm Pilots also need to be updated, according to the UITS Web site.\n“Cellular devices should receive updates for the correct time directly from the cellular network,” Aikman said. If the phone or PDA does not update, turn it off and on, he said. “If a device still fails to update, check with your service provider to ensure no extra steps are needed for your phone model.”\nUITS assures students there will be no major problems Monday morning.\n“In some cases, Monday will be as anxiously anticipated as Jan. 1, 2000, was for the Y2K crisis. There will be lots of early-morning testing and verification to ensure that the clock change occurred, and everything works,” Aikman said.\n“The days following the start of DST will likely yield some minor problems here and there,” he said. “As far as we know, we have done due diligence in preparing for this change, but there will undoubtedly be something that didn’t surface in a test or in our preparations. We will be ready to respond to such events.”\nFor more information about changing electronic devices for daylight saving time, visit UITS’s Knowledge Base article about the changes at http://kb.iu.edu/data/auve.html.