Socket Jockeying

I, like something akin to 70% of the enterprise world, use Outlook as my PIM.  I also travel a lot.  I flip flop between the Eastern and Pacific timezones on a weekly basis.  It’s this constant timezone hoping that makes all day events in Outlook a misery.

All day events in Outlook are for holidays and contact birthdays (automatically insterted), as well as, your own created all day or multi-day appointments.  

The  issue is that (1) all day events are tagged with the timezone that they were created in and (2) those timestamps are interpreted as 24-hour periods instead of “tags” on a given date. 

What this means is, that if you create a birthday (say for dear ol’ Mom, on the second of March).  The holiday will be created with the timezone that you happen to be set to at the moment of creation - say Pacific. 

Now, when you use the helpful “swap timezone” feature in Outlook (implying that some part of the Outlook Program Management team realizes that some people work/live in more than one timezone) all hell breaks loose.  Now, your all day event turns into a 24 hour appointment that spans two days.   For our example, when you swap to Eastern (a difference of 3 hours for those that don’t live in either) Mom’s birthday now spans the 2nd and 3rd of March (11:59pm on the 2nd in Pacific time is 2:59am on the 3rd in Eastern).

Worse still, while Outlook 2007 finally moves timezone to a first class citizen by putting it on the appointment ribbon, it doesn’t work for all day appointments - You can create an all day in a timezone, but once created it is forever locked into the that timezone (opening one and trying to change it reveals that the timezone options are all greyed out).

You’re left with the feeling of “this isn’t what I wanted!”  Better yet, when you block out vacaction time, or similar indicators you get this same skewed mess.  Anniversaries are dates not time ranges, period.  I contest that 99.99% of all uses for all day and multi-day events are also dates, not time ranges.

There is an argument in favor of this behavior, and I have spoken to some of the folks that advocate this view.  The claim is that what if you wanted to “invite” someone to a multiday or all day event, you want it to translate to their timezone (say I wanted to invite someone in the India office to a multiday event on my calendar).  For our two events to “line up” truely, they need to be locked to time and thus be timezone aware.

While this is a logical argument, the only thing I can figure about poeple who make it is that they are not ones that actually use all day appointments and deal with multiple timezones.  (It’s actually a classic “engineering” argument for a feature - looking at it purely from a logical standpoint of math and not from the view of actually how people will use a feature.)

I’ve never seen someone use an all day appointment to build a meeting.  At most, they’re used in invites to send out a “FYI: Steve will be on vacation” type of appointment that some people may want to have on their calendar too.  However, I’ve seen people use all day appointments all the time for personal dates, anniversaries, and trip planning.  I have to believe that if a serious user survey of this feature was made, it would be found that “sticky to date” is a lot more desired than “sticky to time”.

Alas, it still doesn’t work (as of Office 2007) and annoys me constantly.  I end up leaving my machine in Pacific time even when I’m in the Eastern timezone just to avoid all the issues it cause (ex: you create some all day events in one timezone and others while you’re in another - blech what a mess on your calendar).

Interestingly, Windows Live calendar respects these types of appointments as “sticky to date”.  Of course, this is not the case if you use Microsoft’s “Outlook Connector” glue that connects Outlook to Windows Live services.  I haven’t tried it in the newly released Vista Windows Calendar.