Steve Cooper, CIO for the Washington-based American Red Cross, said in an e-mail that his agency's detailed DST preparations over the last several months paid off by preventing all but two minor problems.

"All six of the organization's core mission critical systems and 50 related applications are in good stead," Cooper said. "The team's primary effort, focusing on mission-critical assets paid off. There are two minor issues that are being attended to -- a lab database was not fully configured and remediation is under way and a password-protected backup site is still being checked. The team will address noncritical applications during the next few days to ensure there are no issues.

"We can report success across our environment as we spring forward," Cooper said. "It was a tremendous team effort and everyone on the ground feels great."

Cameron Haight, an analyst with Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc., said that by the end of last week, DST preparations for many businesses underwent 11th-hour detours because time was running out to get needed software updates completed. "In several cases, there were last-minute changes of direction," Haight said, including giving up on attempts to get software patched in time and moving instead to manual time changes for calendar-based software and other time-reliant programs.

With one Microsoft patch for its Exchange server application, a patch had to be applied, then a second had to be run to "re-base" or correct meeting calendar entries for the one-hour time change. "Some clients have had less than stellar success with that" when meeting times weren't automatically adjusted as promised and the calendars required manual corrections to be entered, Haight said.