Improve calendar performance in ACT! and other applications

Microsoft have a hotfix for Windows systems that will improve application that uses UTC dates and times - including Outlook, the Windows Event Viewer and many third-party applications.

Most date and time stamps that are created and displayed in Windows and in many applications are stored as UTC. Then, they are rendered in local time by using system APIs. Examples of these include Windows file time stamps, Outlook sent and received dates, and event logging time stamps.

Not all built-in, Windows-based applications use these newly updated APIs. However, they are available to all applications, including third-party applications. These functions are useful in many scenarios, such as a user auditing scenario in which the ability to use DST rules for previous years on a current Windows service pack is important.

Generally, if an application requires historically accurate time stamps, these functions should be used.
This update improves the performance of the functions, and enables historically accurate time-stamp lookup functionality where the application uses these APIs

Tests that have been conducted with an ACT! by Sage database have found loading 16,000 activities reduced in time from 4 minutes to 9 seconds!

The update applies to the following Windows operating systems:

  • Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3)
  • Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2)
  • Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1)
  • Windows Server 2008

You can read more about this update and obtain it from this Microsoft knowledge base article: Description of updates to APIs that enable Windows-based applications to retrieve historically accurate time stamps

If you download it, feel free to post here with any tests to verify improvements.

* With thanks to Sage’s Benjamin Lederer for directing me to this.

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