Develop a Mobility solution to enable users to manage and change timezone on the Mobile app

Background

The Bureau of Meteorology has equipment installed at thousands of remote locations across 8 timezones spanning Cocos Island (Indian Ocean) to Norfolk Island (Pacific Ocean), and from Darwin in Northern Australia to Antarctic stations.

Field work for routine maintenance of these assets is often packaged into a maintenance "trip" that may be 7 – 10 continuous days covering many remote locations across multiple timezones, during which they can be without reliable data communications for several days at a time.

It is essential for the Bureau to collect accurate timestamped data from the field.

Time Zone Issue Summary

During the Maximo Mobile project design and implementation phases the Bureau raised various timezone issues with IBM. IBM indicated that dates and times will be resolved back to server date/times with the user specified default time zone used for UI display only. However, if users invoked the calendar icon, the app will populate the time field with the phone time (which may be in a different time zone to the app) automatically. This can cause issues with syncing, as the server may interpret it as a future time or in the past due to the time difference on the time zone.

Also, IBM product have consistently indicated that the user default time zone must be aligned with the mobile device time zone Regarding a field work trip that covers multiple time zones. However, this is problematical as the user default time zone can't be changed in the Maximo Mobile app and requires Maximo Enterprise.

Bureau preference for timezone behaviour

The Bureau preference for Maximo Mobile timezone behaviour is that there be a configurable option in the Maximo Mobile app so that it uses the timezone on the mobile device.

This option could be switched off so that it reverts to current behaviour of the user profile timezone.

Solution Consideration

From the Bureau's perspective, the ability to change user profile time on the app would need to take into consideration that the user profile time zone could be changed while app is in 'offline mode'. It would be necessary to know which transactions are subject to which time zone as changed by the user. For example, some transactions will be subject to the original timezone (TZ1). Then user changes timezone (to TZ2); the following transactions are subject to TZ2. Then the user changes the timezone again (TZ3), the following transactions are subject to that new timezone (TZ3).