Updating dual time zones for Australian Commonwealth Games Time Zones

The Commonwealth Games are scheduled to be held during March 2006 in Melbourne Australia and several Australian states including New South Wales, Victoria, Australian Capital Territory, South Australia and Tasmania, have changed the Daylight Savings transition end dates to the first Sunday of April 2006. To assist, Microsoft provided a patch so users can add these temporary Australian Daylight savings time zones to Windows.

When the Australian Parliament House tested the patch they found a "bug" that affects members who use the dual time zones feature in Outlook. The additional time zone reference within Outlook is not updated after the Microsoft Commonwealth Games patch is applied.

Because the time zone fix adds new keys to the Windows time zone settings, and doesn't touch Outlook's key for the second time zone, it's technically not a bug, although it will bug anyone who uses one of the affected Australian time zones as the second Outlook time zone.

Time Zone Patch

The patch adds the following keys to the Time Zone options:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Time Zones\AUS Eastern Standard Time (Commonwealth Games 2006)]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Time Zones\Tasmania Standard Time (Commonwealth Games 2006)]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Time Zones\Cen. Australia Standard Time (CommonwealthGames 2006)]

Outlook's second time zone reads the TZ2 value found at this key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\xx.0\Outlook\Options\TimeZone

(where xx = your version of Outlook)

Even though Microsoft doesn't plan to release a patch to update Outlook's secondary time zone setting, parliament members can run a registry file to insure they have the correct time zone set, instead of going to Tools, Options, Calendar, Time Zones to verify. When the time zone changes end, they can revert back to the correct setting using another registry key file.

As a visual clue that the second time zone in Outlook was changed, I recommend changing the second time zone display name to add (CG) to the display name.

More Information

Australian Daylight Savings Changes for Microsoft Products for the Year 2006 (Download)

Microsoft products do not reflect Australian daylight saving time changes for the year 2006 (KB Article)

Windows CE and Windows Mobile devices will not correctly reflect the new transition from daylight saving time in Australia for the 2006 Commonwealth Games (KB Article)