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At the late October summit meeting of state and Federal officials working on the Year 2000 Problem, it was revealed that there has been no agreed-upon standard for coding the date. There is still confusion regarding international standards (none exists). How will the new standard be enforced?
Notice the recommended deadline: June, 1999. They must get this settled by mid-1999! Yes, indeed.
But they're supposed to be ready for testing by . . . of course . . . December 31, 1998. (See "The Official Timetable" in this category.)
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Establish date exchange standards
* The recommended date exchange protocol is a four position year.
* This doesn't impact how your programs are designed or developed just how the date is delivered to the external systems. This by default means that the sender and receiver of the date will receive it in a four-position year. This recommendation doesn't prohibit or exclude mutually agreed upon exchanges in other formats.
- This doesn't impact how your programs are designed or developed just how the date is delivered to external systems. This by default means that the sender and receiver of the date will receive it in a four position year. This recommendation doesn't prohibit or exclude usually agreed upon exchanges.
- What about international (European) date formats? (Does anyone know how many there are, what the frequency of occurance is, are our international counterparts working on this, who in state/federal is impacted?) . . . .
* A standard format cannot be universally set; it may be different for various programs.
* Recommend a target date of no later than July 1999.
* June 1, 1999 may be a better date to allow the states to process any fiscal year end information and then be prepared to transmit to the federal agencies.
* A uniform pre-set target date and format would ultimately save time and facilitate pre-planning for systems managers.
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