With Daylight Savings Time coming up on Nov 4th, here is a refresher on changing the time on your Partner ACS phone system.

Since 1966, most of the United States has observed Daylight Saving Time from at 2:00 a.m. on the first Sunday of April to 2:00 a.m. on the last Sunday of October. As everyone now knows beginning in 2007, most of the U.S. will begin Daylight Saving Time at 2:00 a.m. on the second Sunday in March and revert to standard time on the first Sunday in November.Of course, the algorithm in current PARTNER ACS releases was written to reflect the original Daylight Saving Time schedule. With the upcoming change, this is being modified. Software updates will be available for the Partner ACS R7, R6 and Small Office Edition. Avaya has stated that there is no plans to provide software upgrades for any PARTNER ACS older than Release 6.0.

For those of you that have an older release your only solution to problem, other than upgrading your processor, is to deactivate the Automatic Daylight Savings feature.

The procedure is as follows:

1. Log in to the PARTNER ACS system in the System Administration mode
a. From extension 10 or 11, press [ FEATURE ] [ 0 ] [ 0 ]
b. Press the LEFT intercom button twice
2. Dial [ # ] [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 6 ]
3. To deactivate, dial 2
4. Exit from System Administration [ FEATURE ] [ 0 ] [ 0 ]

Manual setting of the time will now be required on the new Daylight Savings dates. Use these directions to set your time manually:

1. Log in to the PARTNER ACS system in the System Administration mode
a. From extension 10 or 11, press [ FEATURE ] [ 0 ] [ 0 ]
b. Press the LEFT intercom button twice
2. Dial [ # ] [ 1 ] [ 0 ] [ 3 ]
3. Enter the new time in 24-hour notation. For example, to set the time to 3:15pm,
press [ 1 ] [5] [ 1 ] [ 5 ]
4. Exit from System Administration [ FEATURE ] [ 0 ] [ 0 ]

The latest PARTNER ACS release have already been modified for the new Daylight Savings schedule. The releases with the enhancement are PARTNER ACS R7.0.91K and PARTNER ACS R6.85T . To determine the release of your PARTNER ACS press [ Feature ] [ 5 ] [ 9 ] at any display telephone. The release number will show on the display.

Built in to these releases is an enhancement called “Network Time Synchronization”. If you subscribe to Incoming Caller ID; the time is sent along with the Caller ID information. PARTNER ACS (with the above releases) reads this information and automatically adjusts the system clock accordingly.

Although this does not deactivate the Automatic Daylight Savings Time feature, it will automatically correct the clock.