Microsoft Gives Customers Something to Fall Back OnQ&A: Rich Kaplan discusses the second part of the Daylight Saving Time extension to come in North America, lessons learned from March’s “spring forward,†and the effects these changes have on customers around the world. It used to be easy to know when to move your clocks back an hour and ahead to accommodate the changes brought upon by Daylight Saving Time in North America, but times have changed... literally. On Aug. 8, 2005, U.S. President George W. Bush signed the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which among other things extended the period of Daylight Saving Time by four weeks. Starting this year, Daylight Saving Time began in March, three weeks earlier in much of the United States and Canada, and will end one week later – the first Sunday in November.
The Act was designed as an energy conservation measure, saving power as workers spend more time on the job during daylight hours. But it has had some other positive side effects also. For one, many children in North America will be able to trick-or-treat during daylight this year.
However, the IT industry has had to find a way to update the automatic change-over configuration for just about every server and computer across the United States and much of the world. Many Microsoft customers all over the globe were impacted by the need to update the Windows operating system, as well as apply updates and deploy tools for other Microsoft products including Exchange, Windows Mobile and Outlook implementations. In addition, many products from other industry vendors were also impacted and often had to be similarly updated.
While the process was relatively straight forward for consumers and small businesses, some large enterprise customers felt a pinch in deploying updates across dozens, hundreds – even thousands of systems – and ensuring that each was adjusted to the appropriate time change for its region of the United States or the world.
When the dust settled, it was up to Rich Kaplan, vice president of Supportability and Customer and Partner Experience (CPE) at Microsoft, and his team to figure out what had worked, and more importantly, critically assess what could have been done better. It’s their job to make sure that Microsoft collects and uses feedback from customers and partners to improve program and product quality, using analytics from the company’s customer service systems and field staff to identify and solve critical customer issues.
PressPass spoke with Kaplan to discuss the team’s progress since March and what the group will be focusing on as they endeavor to make the upcoming North America “fall back†and other changes around the world a seamless experience for customers.
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