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There is a system which will feed users in Salesforce. The feed currently does not maintain the Timezone where the user is located.

The requirement is that once the activities for that particular user are fed into the Salesforce, the user should get events scheduled for him as per his Timezone. My high level opinion is that the feed should get the values for user's timezone in a particular column and should map to one of the picklist values of "Timezone" field in Salesforce. This will take care of displaying accurate time for events scheduled in his timezone.

Please advise if the solution is correct or if there is any better way to fulfil this requirement.

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1 Answer

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If you schedule the activity using the DateTime object, all you need to do is specify the time in GMT. Salesforce will handle displaying the proper time to each user based on the time zone set on their user profile.

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Thanks Jesse for your answer. But, not sure if I was able to make my question clear. For example : If the user is from San Francisco, he should have his User record in Feed contain one column of timezone to be mapped with say PDT one in Salesforce and then load that user in Salesforce. If there is one event scheduled for 4 pm PDT today, he will be able to see event for today with Start Date Time as today 4 pm. – Vimal Desai Feb 7 at 14:34
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I understand the question. Salesforce's user standard object already associates a user with a timezone. If you are loading a feed item in the GMT timezone, the system should take care of itself. If you want to assign a user a task for 5pm EST, you would assign the task as 10pm GMT. Then a user with the EST time zone will see it in their feed as 5pm but a user in PST would see it as 2pm. Salesforce will handle the conversion for you. – Jesse Altman Feb 7 at 14:39
Ok, I now understand you better. So, a question : Let say they do not want to feed User times in GMT but will take care of times from their side in a column (say PDT time for a PDT user and EST time for an EST user) and then map with corresponding values in Salesforce Timezone. Will that also yield the accurate event times in Salesforce? – Vimal Desai Feb 7 at 15:02
That should work fine. You really don't need to convert it at all. You should be able to just specify the time zone and Salesforce will handle all of the conversions. GMT was just an example. If the server time is in EST, as long as you specify EST when you push a new item over, a user in PDT will have the time converted by Salesforce when they log in to view it. If you want to convert it before sending it over, that would also work fine. Just make sure you specify the time zone properly. – Jesse Altman Feb 7 at 15:11
Great! I did get answer to my question but for the last time would like to go one step further. We have feeds for other entities coming into Salesforce and we are planning to have an ETL tool do transformations, extractions, etc. (example : Informatica). Can I try to leverage the ETL tool to do User feed? Or We can take care of User feed into Salesforce via Data Loader, etc. Please advise. – Vimal Desai Feb 7 at 15:16
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