We have Sitecore 9.0 web apps on Azure App Services, Is it safe to change the time zone of the App Services?

Question

We have Sitecore 9.0 web apps hosted on Azure App Services. These App Services are in a different timezone that where our content authors are located. We want all the times displayed in Content Editor (which includes some of our custom editors) and other admin areas to be displayed in local timezone of our content authors. What is the recommended way forward?

• To change the time zone of the App Services using WEBSITE_TIME_ZONE setting in App Service (ref: https://medium.com/@the.green.man/change-the-server-time-of-an-azure-app-service-eef05a01f506)
• To change the time zone in Sitecore's web.config using ServerTimeZone setting (ref: https://doc.sitecore.com/developers/90/sitecore-experience-manager/en/settings-supporting-utc-implementation.html)

Are there any consequences that we should be aware of when applying any of these settings (e.g. impact on logs, tasks)?

We would like methods like Sitecore.DateUtil.ToServerTime to work as expected.

Answer 1

Our client was creating some event type of items in Sitecore which has a start time and end time. We were supposed to display the upcoming events. Now if we find the upcoming event using DateTime.Now would have returned the upcoming event according to azure app timezone. So I have used ServerTimeZone setting of Sitecore to set the server time to event location which was our client's time zone and issue was sorted. Also displayed any other times by converting them to Server Time.

For logging stuff you should check what time is getting in to you logs and all.

Thanks