How to Change User Timezone in Calendar

gokay · 7 January 2025 04:01

Hi everyone,

We’re running an OnlyOffice server from Docker containers, and I’ve run into an issue with timezones. Our server is set to PST, but we have a user in EST. While OnlyOffice seems to pick up the computer’s timezone for the current time and display the user’s time next to the red line on the calendar, all events and calendar entries remain in PST.

Technically, everything works, notifications are given at the correct time,etc., but it’s quite frustrating for the user. They constantly have to do mental math to adjust the event times, making scheduling unnecessarily complicated. Additionally, all of their emails are have PST timestamps.

I’ve searched through the documentation, forums, and the internet, but I haven’t found a way to change the calendar timezone for a specific user.

Is there a way to change all the times in OnlyOffice to the users time, or somehow set the timezone for individual users in OnlyOffice? I would love to adjust OnlyOffice to the user so that everything in it is in their time, instead of the user to do everything in server’s timezone.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Constantine · 9 January 2025 15:37

Hello @gokay

Please specify version of the portal. You can find by opening About this program page from the avatar of your profile.

Also, please let me know if you are sharing your calendars with full access or in read-only mode.

gokay · 10 January 2025 06:20

Hi @bal3nar,

I am running version 12.7.1.1942.

We have OnlyOffice calendars that are shared with full access. The user has their own calendar and shared OnlyOffice calendars with read/write access. They also have outside calendars, e.g. from Google, that are read-only.

Thanks for your help, and let me know if there is anything else you need from me.

Constantine · 13 January 2025 09:57

Thank you for the reply. User can change time-zone by clicking the pencil to the right of the calendar on the left toolbar in the Time Zone drop-down menu.

gokay · 18 January 2025 23:27

Hi @Constantine,

Thanks for your suggestion. Updating the timezone from the pencil does change the timezone of the event, but does lead to other issues. I think I can explain a little better with a concrete example:

The server is in PST, and this is what the user in EST will see when they log in:

We have 3 calendars: Yellow and blue are OnlyOffice calendars. Yellow is the users own calendar and is in EST. The blue is a shared calendar by another user in PST. The purple is a Google calendar and its timezone is locked as EST.

As far as we can tell, most things technically work here. The times are correct, the events are all displayed at correct times according to their time zones and notifications are given at the proper times. However, the calendar, blue and yellow calendar events are in PST, while the purple calendar events are in EST. So any time the user is doing something in their calendar, they have to keep track of which calendar it is so that they can create the event in the correct time zone. If they were to something in a shared calendar, like the blue one, they have to add or subtract 3 hours to the times in their head to calculate the time in PST.

If we take your suggestion and move everything to EST, this is what we get:

Now, everything is displayed correctly visually. However, this leads two issues:

The server is still is PST and it does not conform to the user’s time so now all notifications are given 3 hours late. I suppose we could update the notification settings to also be 3 hours ahead to deal with that, but that will now new issues with non-OnlyOffice calendars that will need to be
All of the other timestamps for the user are still off by 3 hours, so email, tasks, etc all show timestamps that are off by 3 hours.

What I am looking to do is to create the visuals of the second case so that the times for the calendar on the left is in the timezone of the user, and all timestamps for events, emails, tasks, etc move to this timezone. It would be ideal if it was automatically done since it seems like OnlyOffice can tell what timezone the user is in, but I am happy with any solution. If there is a timezone option for the user in the settings somewhere, or if there is something we can change or update to make the times adjust to the user, I dont mind doing a bit of work to get there. It might be broken for a few days here and there when a user is traveling or something but it would still almost all the time.

Currently, some of our users have serious usability issues because the times they see in OnlyOffice are unreliable. If we do not have a solution to this in OnlyOffice, I am also happy to learn about any workarounds we can implement, such as exporting calendars so that we can import them into somewhere that can automatically handle timezones.

OnlyOffice has been amazing so far, and we have had so few issues we were not able to deal with. This seems like to one big thing that has caused a headache so far, and I would love to hear any suggestions.

Thanks for your help.