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Teams meeting announcement to new members has wrong time zone

Anonymous
2020-08-18T20:17:49+00:00

I am a professor using Microsoft Teams for remote teaching due to COVID. I created a new Team for one of my classes, added my students, and set up a recurring meeting at our scheduled class time. The time was specified in our local time zone, Eastern Daylight Time, and the schedule is correct in the Teams app and in my calendar. Here's the meeting creation message that showed up in the General channel, including the correct 1:10pm start time for the class:

Not long after I set all that up, I got a helpful email as a new member of the group to let me know about the recurring event. But in the email, the class time is wrong! See below:

Now, technically, that time isn't "wrong", it's just "very misleading". The class time is shown as 10:10am, with a little note down below that mentions "Dates and times are based on the group's timezone setting: Pacific Standard Time." (I have searched and searched for where to change "the group's timezone setting", but I see no sign of that option anywhere.)

My students would have no reason to think that these times would be in Pacific Time, since our college is in Michigan, and many of them will naturally focus on the highlighted event times without spotting the unexpected time zone note down below. Moreover, this email was sent out automatically while I was still in the process of constructing the class: it's very easy to imagine a student getting the message and thinking that their class time had been changed.

How can I make sure that this potentially misleading information doesn't get sent to the students in the next classes I set up? Is there a setting that I or my campus IT folks need to change to fix "the group's timezone setting"? This really seems like it could be a problem.

Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Teams for education | Meetings and calls | Other

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  1. Anonymous
    2020-08-20T11:19:20+00:00

    I'm not sure where the miscommunication here is coming from. There is no student. This email was sent directly to me from the Microsoft server. The only computers that have been involved in any of what I've written about on this page are my own computer and the mail servers that created and transmitted the message.

    I *assume* that the students in the class also got the same email, presumably with the same Pacific Time issue. That is what has me worried, in case they get confused by it. But I have no direct evidence yet that they saw this, because no student in the class has yet communicated with me in any way since I started the Teams site. (One of them did accept the meeting invitation and I got notified of that, but that was a separate notification message that has nothing to do with what I've written about here.)

    Also, just in case it turns out to be relevant, let me emphasize that I have not at any point actively sent any message to the students about this recurring meeting. The email with the problem (the screenshot you've quoted here) was generated automatically by Teams to be sent to new members without any advance notice to me, letting them know about upcoming meetings they might want to add to their calendars. So there's no mechanism by which I could CC or BCC myself in creating a new message to test this: I'm guessing that the only way to test it will be to create a new Team and set up a meeting for it right away. (I'll be doing that 2-3 more times today or tomorrow, for what it's worth.)

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-08-18T21:24:27+00:00

    Teams and Office Groups (which teams are built in) don't have individual time zone settings - they use your time zone (as in, adjust to the local computer time zones).

    Do all of the students have it as the pacific time zone ?

    When you created the meeting, did the correct time zone show in the meeting ?

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-08-18T20:59:34+00:00

    Thanks for taking the time to reply.

    This particular email message was sent to me, the instructor of the course, on the same machine where I took the first screenshot direct from the Teams app. My computer is a Mac, but its time zone is correctly set to Eastern Daylight Time.

    But to be clear, the incorrect information in that second image could not possibly have been affected by the receiving computer at all, because it is in the hard-coded text of the email message itself. When the message was sent from Microsoft's server, it had those times written in it.

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-08-18T23:52:49+00:00

    Thanks again for helping to think through this. It seems like it must be a subtle issue.

    You're saying in your reply that Teams and Office Groups don't have individual time zone settings, but the email sent to me by Teams makes direct reference to "the group's timezone setting". I'm not sure how to reconcile your description with the email text from Microsoft. (Quite possibly that's part of the underlying problem!)

    I've only seen my own email, and I'm honestly not sure what message the students saw: they aren't on campus yet (class starts next week) and I'm still setting up the course details. But I can't think of anything in my computer or Teams setup that would make my experience different than anyone else's. (I haven't been more than 20 miles from home since I first used Teams when we all went online last spring, let alone to the west coast.)

    The correct time zone did display when I created the meeting (I've double checked that it's right by starting to create a new meeting), and my calendar shows it correctly, and everything else about it seems to be correct. I have never seen anything but the correct time in the Teams interface, anywhere. It's just this email message to me as a new user notifying me of the group meeting times that uses the wrong time zone (and one that has zero connection to me or to my campus).

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  5. Anonymous
    2020-08-18T20:42:09+00:00

    Hi Steuard,

    Is he the only student seeing the pacific time setting? It may just be his system showing the wrong time.

    Assuming he is using windows, he needs to make sure the TimeZoneKeyName in this registry has the correct time zone name - if you are in Eastern it should be Eastern Standard Time. (Not Daylight).

    Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation

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