Add time zone agnostic fields for project and project tasks

Important

Some of the functionality described in this release plan has not been released. Delivery timelines may change and projected functionality may not be released (see Microsoft policy). Learn more: What's new and planned

Enabled for	Public preview	General availability
Users, automatically	-	Sep 2024

Business value

This feature gives you the option to use a field that stores start and end dates on projects and project tasks in a time zone agnostic manner. Currently times are converted to GMT before being saved, and issues can arise when the conversion moves this to a different day. These issues will be solved by using the time zone agnostic fields that are not converted to GMT when stored.

Feature details

Project and project task start and end are saved in a date time format which is converted to GMT prior to saving. They will then be converted back to the user's time zone when being displayed in the product. However, some integrations and customizations pull only the date from this field. Problems with this arise when the conversion to GMT changes the date, then an integration pulls only that date from the field without converting it back to GMT.

To prevent this issue, new fields on the entity are being created which will store the start and end date time without first converting to GMT. This will allow you to confidently pull only the date without concern that the time zone conversion has caused the date to change.