Within Calendar and the days schedule it would be really helpful if it was possible to specify some additional timezones.
This is REALLY helpful when working with international teams, customers and individuals outside your timezone. As such GMAIL and Outlook only offer 1 extra TZ. Having the ability to add more than one would enable the user to see across multiple locations the time of meetings. This may not sound important but where a user is in a “border” time (e.g. 0700-0900 - kids to school etc) being able to accurately specify when a meeting is to occur is helpful.
These should be displayed alongside the existing (Home) Time Zone
GMT PST EST
0900 0100 0400
1000 0200 0500
…
One concern may be screen space, however this should be for the user to decide.
What you propose only works when you can see/have access to their calendar.
With Customers, 3rd party suppliers and people outside your organisation they will not give you access to their calendars.
Most of the time when you arrange a meeting with person X in a different company/timezone you will have to go figure out the maths of the timezone difference, if you work with 3rd parties as well you then have to make sure the time you propose is also in their work day. Easy to do if you are 1 hour apart, increasingly hard with customers and global teams.
Having the different timezones displayed make this much easier to work through.
If you are in Eastern time, and you arrange a meeting with a person in Central time, the invitation will be sent to them and their own calendar application will compensate for the time zone.
If you are just entering meetings manually in your own calendar, set it for 10am Central time and it will automatically display as 11am in your own calendar. Then when you are on a trip to LA, it will display as 9am. It all works automatically displaying everything from your position so that you don’t get confused.
Its not about the conversion, not everything can be managed automatically.
I work in a HIGHLY distributed team with customers all over the globe. In the other tools I’ve used I have multiple timezones specified and use a tool (https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/) to work out when a good time is for myself and others to meet.
As customers and others are highly distributed and I have a busy calendar, being able to glance at the calendar to say “Yes, 16:00 GMT should work for me and its 09:00 your time” is really helpful.
–EDIT–
Just to add to this on the second note. The process I would have to go through would be - Get your timezone, go into settings, change the settings, go back into the calendar, work with the person to a get a common time, create the meeting, go back into settings, change the timezone back and then continue on with my day.
It would just be a hell of a lot faster to just be able to see the different Timezones I’d like to see.
This is what the big competitor offers: up to three time zomes (in week view only), and you can change the time zones by just right clicking into the relevant column. So, its not rocket science.
I am sure, if enough customers supported that request, eM Client might consider it.
For me - 5 years into my retirement - it is not that important.
India has a time zone of UTC +5:30, and like most of Asia, they don’t have daylight savings. The half-hour difference to other time zones makes it more difficult to convert. I know, I spent some years in Asia. Depending on where you are, you may get it wrong. I think all but 2 provinces in Canada use DST, so make sure you know exactly where your customer is when you schedule that appointment on the cusp of the time change. Oh and don’t forget that North America starts and ends DST on different days to Europe. Are you even sure you know when your own DST begins or if you even have it?
Why not just let the computer do what it was designed to do?
Which is why having it displayed (as per pefunk) in the calendar helps solve these interesting timezone problems.
I don’t understand your last statement. I am asking it to “do what its designed to do” I’d just like it to show me the different timezones (i specify) in an extra column/s so its easier for me to “schedule meetings” by looking at my calendar.
Yes, definitely needed! It is a huge help when working across multiple time zones, and it exists with almost any other client (e.g. Outlook, GMail web version)
@Gary please help me understand if you do actually understand this request?
I am trying out this emClient for a large company and having a calendar view with multiple time zones listed as in the screen shot at the top of this thread will be a major factor in our decision.
+1
similar case - working with people cross the world.
please also keep in mind that as for today alternative time zone display is standard and not a premium feature.
It was tactful of you to not name the competitor on eM’s forum, although it will be a minor inconvenience to determine which (presumably non-MSFT) client that is.
I was in a trial period and really liked eM, but this aspect of Outlook was really useful. The ideas expressed by their rep on this forum were all I needed to know to look elsewhere. I’ve worked for many software companies, and when the devs apparently begin to decide that the users are idiots that don’t understand the product/computers, simply because they want what they clearly want, you have a problem. When you let the devs all but expressly say that to the users, well…that’s a new one for me.
Yes, having multiple timezones displayed would be nice. But in the end I still use eM Client for mail and calender, even though I have Outlook on my PC (as part of MS 365).
+1 here - this is the third post I have seen requesting the functionality, The first was from 2015 which ended with someone from emClient warning that adding new features cost a lot of time and effort Useful. I guess it depends whether you want emClient to be taken seriously as a calendar app.
If you really want to open up emClient for features - setup a community development capability where interested parties could a submit code to you for new features via pull requests (you only have to expose the APIs). That’s the way to grow the product these days. But I suppose setting that up would also take time and effort and depends on componentisation of your underlying code base.
This is part of the challenges of this product. You think you know better than your users about their needs. This is needed. This has NOTHING to do with automatically handling the meetings. We need to see two time zones.
Useful. I guess it depends whether you want emClient to be taken seriously as a calendar app.
and depends on componentisation of your underlying code base.