Tip: Apply the
information of this topic also when you are talking with a
colleague who works in another time zone. If so, read colleague
instead of customer in the above text.The IT business is on a global play ground. Your customers and colleagues may be spread around America or even around the world, while you are working from your home office. Using Service Desk and modern communication technologies, you are able to solve the day to day problems of the IT infrastructures and have a good family life. Customers want the problems to be solved on time, in their time. What you do the rest of the day is not of their concern, time is.
Deadlines — the dates and times by which events must be solved — are agreed upon in the customer's local time. Customers want to know the target date and time expressed in their local time, whereas colleagues want to see deadlines expressed in their local time. In Service Desk, you can switch between displaying dates and times in the local time of a customer, a colleague, or your own local time. This way, when talking to a customer, you can discuss dates and times in the customer's own time zone and still see what it means for your own schedule or that of a colleague. Service Desk also takes into account daylight saving hours for you and your customer.
Service Desk can support your work around the world, because date and time information is stored in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). UTC is considered standard time: all other times and time zones are calculated from UTC. For example, if you live and work in Minneapolis (MN, USA) you are in the Central Standard Time (CST) time zone. In the CST time zone it is 6 hours earlier than it is in the UTC time zone. To calculate local time for Minneapolis, six hours are subtracted from the stored time. To calculate local time for Tokyo, Japan, nine hours are added to the stored time.
The following table shows some of the time zones available in Service Desk.
|
Time zone |
Abbreviation |
Difference from UTC |
| Japan Standard Time, Tokyo |
JST | +9 hours |
Kuala Lumpur |
+8 hours | |
| European Central Standard Time, Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris |
ECT | +1 hour |
| Greenwich Mean Time, Greenwich, London |
GMT | 0 |
| Eastern Standard Time, New York, Boston |
EST | -5 hours |
| Central Standard Time, Minneapolis, Chicago |
CST | -6 hours |
| Mountain Standard Time, El Paso, Salt Lake City |
MST | -7 hours |
| Pacific Standard Time, Los Angeles, Seattle |
PST | -8 hours |
Tip: Apply the
information of this topic also when you are talking with a
colleague who works in another time zone. If so, read colleague
instead of customer in the above text.