Default Schedule Changing Time Zone

[AnthonyPe]

Is anyone else encountering an issue where their default Schedule changes time zones by itself? I've got too many people with admin licenses in my instance and everyone says they haven't made the change. I believe them because none of them is anywhere near the WF nerd I am and aren't all that likely to even know where that setting is. I've got a help ticket in, but I wanted to see if anyone else is experiencing this. Anthony Pernice Healthcare Consultancy Group

[JaimesonWe]

Hi Anthony, We've had situations where our teams in Hong Kong and India had issues viewing dates / times that our Minneapolis based teams were entering - but that was being driven by the user's schedule (not necessarily the schedule changing time zones. I'd be interested to hear why / how the time zone was adjusting itself! I think the computer's clock tied into the actual time Workfront was reflecting. Maybe the computer's time zone could impact the WF time too? Good luck! Jaimeson Jaimeson Wennerstrum Periscope, Inc.

[JohnSe1]

We had a similar 'issue' here where an office in Asia was entering in data on a custom form, which included a date/time picker. In my scenario the user's wanted to enter a time value but have no actual timezone value applied, but it was. In fact I was under the impression that a custom field had no actual connection to the system. But it does, as just indicated the time/date picker is tied to the computer's timezone, and other than having the user change the clock on their computer its a no go - well at least not out of the box. I could see if it was one of the stock date/time fields - but not a custom field. Though hindsight I can appreciate that Workfront does bind that custom field to the clock - but maybe a check off box to disable it. Although then that gets into a slippery slope of having an option for XYZ etc.. JohnSeitz ESPN

[DavidCo3]

Hi Anthony, I'm well acquainted with how timezones work in Workfront but I haven't even had an issue with the system default timezone changing on its own. There was a bug once where the timezones of schedules would change when you edited another setting on the schedule, but that was fixed a couple of years ago. Let us know what you hear back from Support. Regarding the other comments, yes, the user's PC clock is all important. If you imagine all dates/times stored in Workfront as being stored in UTC/GMT regardless of the timezone of the user, then the user's PC timezone converts to their timezone for display/entry purposes. Say, a user in London plans a task to start at 9am. Workfront stores it as 9am UTC. A user in Rome looks at that task and it will say 10am because of their PC time. A user in New York will see 4am. What usually happens is that the user in New York is editing a project for work in London, and they mistakenly put 9am (NY time) on the task. Workfront will then store it as 2pm London time, which is what the London users will see and the task will be scheduled to start too late. If the New York user wants the task to start at 9am London time, they must schedule it to start at 4am (NY time). The other option which I sometimes recommend for PMs who are managing projects in other timezones is to change their PC time to the project's time zone in order to make the time entry feel natural. I have requested before, for WF to enable a special editing mode for PMs so they can edit in the local project's timezone rather than their own so that we don't need this workaround. In general, Schedules mainly affect resourcing rather than data display/entry. They affect which days and times users are available to work, and this is what WF uses to schedule tasks when users are assigned. There are a number of other quirks, but they're the big two considerations regarding timezones. Regards, David Cornwell