What Time is it in SharePoint Land? (I missed your meeting because of the time listed in the calendar!)

 

Luis is SharePoint user working on a SharePoint installation installed in the corporate headquarters in Los Angles. The server there is setup on Pacific Time (UTC-08:00). Sam is a team member based in the Atlanta office who has changed his Regional Settings to Eastern Time (UTC-05:00).

Sam schedules a Team Meeting for 10:00 AM.

Luis checks the team calendar as sees:

Luis is in Chicago, knows that Sam is in Atlanta and is wondering why Sam scheduled a meeting for 7:00 AM! Which… is 6:00 AM in Chicago!

 

So What Time is it in SharePoint Land?

Sam did schedule the meeting for 10:00 AM, his time, which is 9:00 AM in Chicago. The problem here is that Luis has never set his Regional Settings and is seeing the server’s default time, which is Pacific.

 

How do we fix this?

If most of the site’s users are in the Chicago area, then we could change the site’s regional settings to Central time. This won’t bother Sam as he has set his preference for time zone in his regional settings. This solves the problem for Luis and other members of the team in the Central time zone. But… it may confuse users back in the home office where they are in Pacific time.

 

What to do?

A) Tell everyone that all times will be in headquarter’s time (Pacific)
  or

B) Train everyone on how to set their time zone preference
  or

C) Create some automation (PowerShell) to update everyone’s time zone based on the region they work in

 

How to change the time zone for the server

Central Administration –> Application Management –> select your application –> in the Ribbon click General Settings, and General Settings and then change the time zone.

How to change the time zone for a single site

Site Actions –> Site Settings –> Regional Settings –> Time Zone

How to change the time zone for a single user

Ask the user to visit any site, click their name at the top right of the page (the Welcome menu) –> click My Settings –> Click My Regional Settings –> uncheckmark Always follow web settings –> Time Zone

 

Note that user settings will override site and application settings and that site settings will override application settings.

 

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