Time is an after thought….

With apologies to the Talking Heads,  but having been battling with Outlook and Exchange at work with regards to meetings and appointments, I think that Microsoft has really decided that time is an after thought. The problem is that start times on appointments are not consistent; they wander by an hour. Everyone, including IT Tech Support thinks that it is a Daylight Saving Time offset issue.

However I have found a flaw in that ointment, my meetings do not move consistently in the same direction, early or late. In addition the problem occurs whether the event was scheduled before the Daylight Saving Time change. So I can’t just look at the meeting and do the math myself as say, if the meeting is scheduled for 2PM it is actually at 1PM as it does not work the same direction that I can find a pattern with.

Here are some challenges that I have hit recently. Each week I participate in a multi-company multi-time zone conference call. It is scheduled for 9:30AM Mountain Time. Notice how I did not say if it is Standard or Saving Time. That is because I am not sure how to define it, and apparently neither is Microsoft.

Outlook is not clear - Click for larger image

Yes, that image is blurred to highlight the time. Notice how it indicates that the meeting is at 9:30AM Mountain Time within the information pane. The start time shows though as 10:30 AM Mountain Time. Yes, that is untouched by me, just opened the occurrence.  So looking at that one would think that meetings would appear an hour later in my calendar.

I can compensate for that if it is consistent. However I have another weekly teleconference once again spanning time zones on Mondays. It is scheduled for 1PM prevailing Eastern Time. However it appears in my calendar at 12Noon. (I am never sure if Noon is AM or PM.)

I also have the same challenge when the meeting is in one time zone and not recurring. I had a meeting with the company president with some coworkers. However all of us had it at different times on the same day. Some were early, some were late.

Now comes the slight twist in here that I have been trying to keep out of the process, the Blackberry. I thought maybe it was caused by the fact that the Blackberry also synchronizes to the Exchange Server and that might be causing problems. So I turned off calendar synchronization while I was troubleshooting this issue with the calendar. It did not make a difference. I decided to turn it back on as it did not have an effect.

It did have an effect but not the one that I expected. The appointment time on the Blackberry would show differently that on Outlook on the laptop. Okay, so this means that one of them would be right one would expect. No such luck, it is also inconsistent. I scheduled a meeting for 4PM and it appeared in my Blackberry at 5PM. I scheduled another meeting for 3PM and it displayed in my Blackberry at 2PM. Once again, one time zone, scheduled and occurred the same day so there were not time changes.

I almost wore out search phrases on Google and Wikipedia before I finally called IT. I spent time with them and still do not have an answer. They tried a Windows and Outlook Patch, but no change. So I am just getting good at confirming the meeting times. I am sure that people think I have no concept of time, I simply reply that I do, my work computer doesn’t. Before anyone says, so how does the Macintosh handle it? So far no problems, but is that the operating system or is that Thunderbird with the Lightning addon?