Paul, Every user has a User Preference record.
One of the settings on that User Preference record is the timezone. By default, permissions are set up so that users can change their user preference. Now, the user preference form is a FORM. That means it has permissions. You can simply change the permissions (create an overlay of the field). You can remove all write permission to that field from everyone. You could remove read permission too, but you might as well leave that so users are aware. Then, set a default value of UTC for the time zone. If there are existing User Preference records, an Administrator can do a modify all for all cases where it is not UTC to set it to UTC for existing users. For every new user, create a user preference record as part of creating the user. Now, every user has UTC set as their timezone and they cannot change it. By the way, this same technique can be used for any user preference field. You can take over the preference and prevent the user from specifying it by simply modifying permissions on the fields on the user preference form. I hope this helps, Doug Mueller From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Paul Blasquez Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2013 1:09 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: UTC Time ** Hi everyone, thanks for replying. My issue isn't with the server side of things, I'm fully comfortable setting up UTC there. I think Joe saw the point best - we want to control the user timezone and set it to be UTC as well. As to why, the reason is that we have multiple locations in multiple timezones and we do not want to put the math on the user to figure what the "real" time is for that location. We display all times in "Site Local Time" and do the timezone offset in the background based on the timezone of the location the user is focused on. "Site Local Time" is actually just server time, and we have all user preferences locked to PST and the server is PST as well. There are issues that come up every year having to do with DST, primarily the fact that 2am does not exist for one day each spring. In this case, our European users cannot select a perfectly legitimate hour for their site because it happens to not exist for the application's timezone. There are other issues that we have dealt with as well, like time jumping forward and backward across date ranges that cross a PST DST boundary. So our options here are to figure out the correct way to lock users into UTC, or as a backup plan we may decide to use Phoenix time for everything as it does not have DST. We would prefer to use the global standard. I hope that makes things more clear. To re-iterate, the actual question here is, is it possible for the user preference to be set to UTC in any way shape or form? Thanks, -Paul On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 6:25 AM, patrick zandi <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: ** have lots of utc servers.. never had issues.. (except to remember that escalations run on SERVER time not local time)... Patrick Zandi _ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are" and have been for 20 years_ _ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are" and have been for 20 years_ _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org "Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years"
