Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Springing Forward into DST

Do you know that Daylight Savings Time (DST) starts earlier than usual? This Sunday, March 9, 2008 (in the U.S.) the change in DST will require that we reset our clocks. Our time will “spring forward” by an hour. So it’s time to remind you of a bug alert we originally posted back in December, 2007 (see http://ce-annotations.blogspot.com/search/label/Daylight%20Savings%20Time).

If you try to set a time for an event (entry in calendar or assignment or assessment due date) on March 9, Blackboard changes the time to an hour later. Here’s an example: if you type in a time (like 11:00 PM) or use the drop down menu to choose a time, it may appear correct until you save it, then the time is set forward without warning to 12:00 AM (which would be on March 10). As far as we know now, this anomaly only occurs on March 9. If you don’t expect the behavior, you may be frustrated and waste a lot of time trying to figure it out.The work-around is to simply set the time for the due date an hour earlier than you really want.

In actuality, Blackboard has released a hotfix to Service Pack 3 that fixes the DST problem, however, we’re still testing Service Pack 3 and are not scheduled to install it until March 20 (during Spring break), so the hotfix is available to apply to a patch that we have yet to finish testing. Further, since the hotfix was just released we must test it before putting it into production.

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