Calendar Report: dates shift based on user timezone?

[HeatherLa2]

I have created a calendar report to show regional email and webinar dates. The PMs know to keep the Planned and Actual Completion dates the same for accuracy. However, depending on where the user is viewing the report, the dates are shifting.

For example, this is the June 24th date when viewed in Pacific Daylight Timezone:

This is the June 24th date when viewed in Eastern European Summer Timezone:

Can anyone provide any insight as to why this is happening? June 24th should be June 24th, no matter where in the world you are.

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi Heather,

I ran into this (again) yesterday.

Ever since those do-gooders confirmed the Earth is round, although June 24th will eventually be June 24th everywhere, it depends what timezone you are in.

Under the hood, Workfront stores datetime fields (such as Planned Completion Date and Actual Completion Date) in Universal Time within the database...including hours, minutes, and seconds. So yesterday, during a screen share call, an update (e.g. Planned Completion Date = June 24 Eastern time) was showing up in the Updates tab with that same date, but for me, was showing as June 23 (i.e. 10pm Mountain time, which is 2 hours behind Eastern). Without seeing the Hours, it looked like a bug, but then we realized that our time zones were simply (accurately, but perplexingly) reporting the dates from each of our perspectives.

Regards,

Doug

[HeatherLa2]

Hi, Doug - thanks for responding! I understand the timezone difference as far as Workfront providing date and timestamps for your specific location, ie, telling me when someone responded to a comment in my timezone, not theirs (I'm in MST and most of my team is in PST).

However, when a webinar is schedule on a calendar for June 24th, 11:00 am PST as per our Default Schedule, and is a Fixed Date on the schedule, I would want our calendar to show this date and time for all users. We are not using this calendar for anything other than to tell our global team when a webinar is taking place and its corresponding emails are scheduled. The actual invite and webinar will adjust to local time differences.

If this is not possible, then I will need to scrap this idea, which is super disappointing.

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi Heather,

Although there is a CLEARTIME feature in textmode (which drops the time portion of a date), I don't think that will help in this case, nor would trying to report using a "Run As" with someone in a different timezone: the viewer's computer is aware of the local time, and will "helpfully" adjust the (time-aware) dates accordingly, which will defeat the purpose of this global calendar. If you do figure out a workaround (besides telling folks to change their timezone to PST whenever they look at the report, which would be cheating; and unpopular), I'd be very interested to learn more about it.

In the meantime, if you're open to alternatives, I invite you to consider our PDF Calendar solution (with which we could configure a "timezone specific" version for each region you need), or our Draggable Calendar solution (which is designed to handle timezones, supports data driven coloring, and can also be configured in a read-only fashion), or any of our other calendar related solutions that you think might do the trick.

Regards,

Doug

[HeatherLa2]

Thanks, Doug! Love your solutions but not sure we can add in another vendor at this point to get what we are looking for. Looks like it is back to using the manual Sharepoint calendar. 😐

Have a great Friday!