Timezones and SharePoint
Hi!
A customer of mine wanted to make sure that users in different time zones always has the local time shown when looking at items in document libraries, lists etc. Beforehand we knew that SharePoint sites have their own regional settings, independent of the SharePoint server regional settings. But this was not enough. Let's say that an project site has members that is scattered all over the world, how is the regional settings supposed to be configured?
The answer was easier than expected. None of us knew that, at least in SharePoint 2007, each users can have their own regional settings. The regional setting is reached if clicking on the "Welcome <loginname>"-dropdown in the top right corner of SharePoint. Select My Settings and you are redirected to a page with a toolbar that looks like this:
Here the user can change her/his own regional settings by clicking on the My Regional Settings link. Here the user have the choice of either keeping the regional settings of the web site or making her/his own regional settings.
The effect of this change is immidiate.
It might be a good idea to make a small javascript that compares the local time zone with the timezone in SharePoint and if there is a difference pop up a message that says something like, don't forget to change your timezone. This is only a precation since it is quite easy not to remeber to change the regional settings in SharePoint after setting the clients timezone.
//Sebastian
The permission level that must be activated for the group that contains the users is the Edit Personal User Information which could be found under the Site Permission section when editing a Permission Level.
Good luck!
//Sebastian (Comment this)