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Key: JRA-9
Type: New Feature New Feature
Status: Open Open
Priority: Minor Minor
Assignee: Unassigned
Reporter: Mike Cannon-Brookes [Atlassian]
Votes: 125
Watchers: 58
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JIRA

User Preference: User Time Zones

Created: 07/Feb/02 11:08 PM   Updated: 10/Apr/08 05:05 PM
Component/s: User Management
Affects Version/s: None
Fix Version/s: None

Time Tracking:
Not Specified

Issue Links:
Duplicate
 
Reference
 

Participants: Adam Saint-Prix, Alvin Cura, Anthony Phan, Anton Mazkovoi [Atlassian], Ben Fletcher, Charles Burke, Darren Fraser, David Allardyce, Eirik Lühr, Frank San Miguel, Grant Holland, Grant McKenzie, James Kleist, Jean-Baptiste Catté [SunGard], Jed Wesley-Smith [Atlassian], Jeff Cadow, Jeff Schnitter, Karsten Silz, Lars, mameha, Michael Phillimore-Brown, Mike Cannon-Brookes [Atlassian], Mike Murphy, Nazir Kutub, Nick Menere [Atlassian], Owen Fellows, Patrick Kwok, Patrick Wolfert, Scott Bilas, sebbapache, Stafford Vaughan [CustomWare] and Yusuf Khatri
Since last comment: 4 weeks ago
Support reference count: 27
Labels:


 Description  « Hide
Add time zones to user profile. That way the dates displayed to a user are always contiguous with their local time zone, rather than the server's time zone.

 All   Comments   Work Log   Change History      Sort Order: Ascending order - Click to sort in descending order
Owen Fellows - 16/Nov/03 07:55 PM
This is due to users not having a timezone set, see linked Issue.

Michael Phillimore-Brown - 20/Feb/04 03:23 AM
You could presumably identify the user's locale from the request too...

Grant McKenzie - 21/Dec/04 04:40 PM
I'd like to see this feature aswell. In a centralized server that is shared internationally, people want to see local times not EST or GMT.

This cannot be inferred from the locale in my opinion. I might live in the US and have a timezone of EST but want to display the German language interface.


Frank San Miguel - 16/Mar/05 04:50 PM
This is very important to us since our users are spread throughout the USA in every timezone. We use date fields to determine the responsiveness (Mean time to respond) to an issue. Not having the local timezone has been causing problems for some users since they get it wrong by up to three hours.

Nazir Kutub - 04/Aug/05 10:44 AM
I'd like to see it implemented too. Our users are going crazy with the math

sebbapache - 03/Sep/05 07:18 AM
1) It does not seem to be possible to configure a timezone anywhere

2) At the very least, the time displays should include the timezone being used


Scott Bilas - 09/Jan/06 05:45 PM
We're using Jira across about four offices and some time zones for them are 12 hours away. It makes it very confusing to figure out when a change has been made to a bug. I've added my vote.

Mike Murphy - 16/Feb/06 04:49 PM
Yeah this is a key option for users who aren't worldly sensitive to time

Anthony Phan - 25/Apr/06 04:28 PM
This is definitely something we need also.

Patrick Wolfert - 12/Jul/06 08:53 AM
Hi,

This doesn't seem to have been answered specifically so:

Using Windows XP and IE 6, if I have a TZ environment variable properly set, will JIRA pick that up and report the local time?

Thanks.


Nick Menere [Atlassian] - 12/Jul/06 09:18 PM
Patrick,

All times are currently reported in the servers timezone. We will post when we schedule user specific timezones.

Cheers,
Nick


Stafford Vaughan [CustomWare] - 05/Dec/06 05:08 PM
Is there any ETA for this feature in JIRA? I've had some requests for this recently.

Thanks,
Stafford


Grant Holland - 04/Jan/07 09:55 PM
I work in a large global organisation which has recently adopted JIRA. This timezone fix is essential to us as we are scattered across different timezones and tracking when an issue was logged / updated in our own timezone is critical.

It is very disappointing that a simple feature request is now outstanding for over three years!!! I imagine this was overlooked when this product was evaluated and I for one would have seen this as a potential showstopper to purchasing this.


Lars - 05/Jan/07 04:26 AM
Is this a big issue to fix since it hasn't been fixed yet?

Nick Menere [Atlassian] - 07/Jan/07 05:37 PM
There is a bit of debate whether this is hard or easy....
Though Confluence guys just managed to put it into 2.3. so I guess we may revisit soon. We don't really consider how long an issue has been open when scheduling, we try to schedule the most important issues at the time.

Sorry I don't have any more info at the moment.

Cheers,
Nick


David Allardyce - 09/Feb/07 04:13 AM
I would like to add my support for this new feature. It would certainly be advantageous to our users if they could see times in their local time zone, rather than that of the server.

Jeff Cadow - 02/Mar/07 12:40 PM
Wow, still open for debate after 3 years? I too work for a company that's got people all over - California, Boston, Belgium, India, ... This is the only tool we use that does not support client-specific timezone adjustment.

Jean-Baptiste Catté [SunGard] - 15/Mar/07 09:55 AM
You're right Jeff: how something so simple can not be implemented? Even Confluence support it...

Jeff Schnitter - 21/Mar/07 06:50 PM
Just want to add my two cents that we'd really like this feature. We are a small company with most employees located in California, but we have employees all over the U.S. We just moved our JIRA server to a data center located out of the timezone. I assumed that I'd be able to configure the timezone since I can do that today in Confluence. I was surprised that I couldn't configure the timezone and was disappointed to see this feature request open for almost 3 1/2 years.

Atlassian, I love you guys. I love JIRA and Confluence, but I find myself frustrated at the differences between JIRA and Conflence. It's very frustrating to see a feature available in one product, but not the other. It leaves a strong impression that you treat the two products almost as if they were run by separate companies. Please, please strive to get more consistency between the two products and please, please implement this feature.


Karsten Silz - 29/Jul/07 11:09 PM
I think this really should have been in from the beginning. The main reason is not that it allows people from different timezones to collaborate. For me, the main reason is that I believe a server's timezone should always be set to GMT / UTC to shield it from the wackiness of daylight saving time and switching timezone. In this scenario the pure server time is "unusable" for nearly all JIRA users (relatively few people live in a GMT timezone). For instance, we're on Eastern Time in the U.S., but the JIRA time is always GMT.

So, please fix this soon since it makes tracking down times and dates usable in JIRA for us.


Patrick Kwok - 03/Sep/07 11:31 PM
I actually think that this is a HIGH priority. Without this feature, the only option is to create a separate Jira system for each time zone, which is not a good solution at all.

Yusuf Khatri - 24/Sep/07 02:35 AM
I really think this feature should have a higher priority. Medium, if not High... but definately not Minor.

This is one of those things that seem minor but cause quite a bit of inconvenience from an end-user perspective.

I've just started using JIRA and I am really liking it. I noticed that one of my colleagues had logged an issue at 3:37am, which I am sure she didn't and a bit of digging around revealed that this was a different timezone.

We're using an Enterprise Edition of JIRA with projects running across different continents and this feature is an absolute must in order to help us correctly synchronise and track issues.


Ben Fletcher - 26/Sep/07 08:45 PM
We are also seriously looking at Jira at the moment, and a major blocker for us is the lack of user timezones. We need "follow the sun" support for our support teams and it's critical that the user's local timezones are used.

Has this been scheduled for a future release?


Anton Mazkovoi [Atlassian] - 26/Sep/07 11:25 PM
Hi,

Thank you for your comments and feedback. We realise that this issue is important and would like to implement it in the future. We have a lot (thousands) of feature and improvement requests and our main challenge is to select which features to add next.

We woud like to do this feature carefully as users can exist in various time zaones and every time a date is entered (due date, date and date/time custom fields) we need to ensure we do not store the wrong date.

Unfortunately, at the moment this feature is not scheduled for a particular release, and therefore I am unable to provide a date for its implementation. I am sorry for not being able to help more at this time.

Thanks,
Anton


James Kleist - 27/Sep/07 07:15 AM
Hi Anton,

It would help others if Atlassian provided an FAQ on scheduling issues. The response below is a nice way of saying that the issue will remain unscheduled and that's the way it is. I believe people want to know one way or the other whether an issue will be fixed.

James.


Jean-Baptiste Catté [SunGard] - 27/Sep/07 08:09 AM
What I have now understood is that if you want really want something done in JIRA, there is no other solution than doing it yourself.

Alvin Cura - 27/Sep/07 05:50 PM - edited
Likewise, this is a critical issue for our organization as well.

I have a question...

What is the impact of changing the timezone on the live system? What happens to the information currently in the MySQL database?

This question is also tracked in https://support.atlassian.com/browse/JSP-16047


Jed Wesley-Smith [Atlassian] - 28/Sep/07 01:36 AM
It depends on the database and whether there is timezone information in the date columns. Postgres for example stores the data with a timezone, so if I change my JIRA server timezone from GMT+10 (Sydney) to GMT+0 (London) then the display of the time (say on the issue updated time) will go back 10 hours. So if originally I edited it at 5pm Sun, change my JIRA timezone to London then re-display the issue it will show it was updated at 7am.

MySQL timezone support doesn't seem to store timezone with the date, but as a global preference. This means that the JIRA's server timezone is effectively ignored if changed.


Anton Mazkovoi [Atlassian] - 28/Sep/07 04:55 AM
Hi,

The FAQ for the way issues are scheduled can be found here:
http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DEV/Implementation+of+New+Features+and+Improvements

We are listening, and with every release we try to enhance JIRA as much as we can. Some of the popular requested features included in the last few releases are:

  • editable comments
  • convert issues to sub tasks and vice versa
  • added start dates and the ability to edit and delete worklogs
  • aggregate time tracking information across sub tasks

We would prefer to leave this issue open as we are planning to look at it in the future. However, as I have mentioned in my previous comment, we do not have the date for its implementation.

Cheers,
Anton


Jean-Baptiste Catté [SunGard] - 28/Sep/07 08:15 AM
Jed,

It means you can loose your data consistency only by switching your JIRA installation from a server to another. So it makes crystal clear that you cannot rely on the database to manange timezones and raises this issue criticity.
The best would be to store all the dates GMT and then to change the timzone only when the date is displayed according to the user settings, Java can handle this easily.

Cheers,

Jean-Baptiste


Eirik Lühr - 03/Oct/07 01:17 AM
Yes, this is also a critical feature for our company, with offices and clients spread around the world. With the newly added/improved work log functionality (good work by the way!) it becomes even more important.

mameha - 02/Dec/07 10:40 PM
I also think this is actually kind of a bug.

In my opinion fixing this kind of thing is more important than adding, say, AJAX lookups of usernames and issues.


Darren Fraser - 25/Feb/08 11:24 AM
This is also important for us. We have offices in UK, Europe, across North America and Australia and each time zone has to try and convert back to GMT (where the server is based) - it makes thing very difficult.

mameha - 29/Feb/08 12:23 AM
I am displaying the current server time in the footer. This makes it easier for users to at least quickly judge how old a comment is.

Just edit $JIRAHOME\includes\decorators\footer.jsp

old:

footer.jsp
...
<div class="footer">
...

new:

footer.jsp
...
<div class="footer">
Current Server Time: <%= new java.util.Date() %> <br/>
...

If someone who knows JSP can tell me how to format the date above into "dd/MMM/yyyy hh:mm a z" format it would be appreciated.


Adam Saint-Prix - 31/Mar/08 01:40 PM
We have the same problems mentioned above. We have offices in California and Korea with multiple users collaborating on projects with deadlines that involve users in both places.

In Korea if issues are logged to be completed by April 1st 9am, that would be Mar 31st 5pm here in California.

Clearly, this could be problematic if a deadline is misinterpreted.

In any event, I'm voting for this issue to be fixed and hopefully included in a release sooner rather than later if at all possible.

Thanks,

Adam G. Saint-Prix [Outspark]


Charles Burke - 10/Apr/08 05:05 PM
We are implementing globally and need different timezones for each office. We created a separate project for each office. Ideally, it will adjust for the timezone of each user but setting a timezone by project would also be acceptable for us.