timezones, a default value, and how to import?

[phingers]

I know that Zimbra's web client automatically knows the timezone based on the browser.

But is there a way to set a default timezone for users?

I have a third party app I'm integrating, and it sends ICS files into zimbra. Currently without any timezone information, making the appointment show up as GMT, or in our case 5 hours off.

But the app could be used anywhere. So I have a couple options I suppose...

1) Get the browser's time zone in our third party app, like zimbra does.
2) Add a timezone field into our app for each user.

Any other good ways to handle this?

[jhahm]

If you're only dealing with single appointments, using GMT is fine. The hour/minute just has to be set correctly in GMT, and various calendar apps (Zimbra included) should translate the time accordingly. So if you want "8am Pacific Time", you can instead say "4pm GMT". A user in Pacific timezone will see the appointment at 8am, and a user in Eastern timezone will see it at 11am.

If you have recurring appointments you then need to provide a VTIMEZONE with the correct daylight savings time rules and specify all time fields in that timezone.

Currently ZCS has a field to store user's local timezone but it is not being supported thoroughly. (support coming in later release) Once that's there, you can look at it to get the timezone ID of the user, then find the VTIMEZONE definition for it in /opt/zimbra/conf/timezones.ics file.