Quest Software Timezones-IT
- Overview
- Benefits
- Dynamic Time Zone Switching
- Advantages over TZ Redirection
- Licensing
- Resources
Designed exclusively for Microsoft Windows Terminal Services environments, TimeZones-IT is a time zone assignment tool that allows Administrators to specify the desired time zone on a per-client basis. With TimeZones-IT, users can execute their server-based applications in their own locales, completely independently of the Terminal Server’s time zone setting. As such, TimeZones-IT finally solves a long-standing challenge that has often plagued many Terminal Services deployments.
With an increased dependency on Terminal Services to deliver line-of-business
applications from a central location, companies are often faced with the inability
to provide their geographically dispersed users with localized date and time as
required for accounting and other date-and-time sensitive applications. With TimeZones-IT, users from around the world can now compute in their local time
zones, independently of other users sharing the same Terminal Server.
Some of the benefits of TimeZones-IT are:
- Supports ALL time zones.
- Works with Terminal Services running on Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003.
- Supports Group Policy Objects via an included policy template (figure 1).
- Supports scripting for time zone assignment (figure 2).
- Supports a database-enabled mode allowing Administrators to use the Provision Management Console (PMC) to specify the desired time zone by user, group, OU, and physical device specified by name or IP address (figure 3).
Figure 1 – TimeZones-IT policy template
Figure 2 – Assigning time zones via scripts
Figure 3 – Assigning time zones via the Provision Management Console.
If so desired, Administrators may allow their users to alter their time zone setting during the course of an active session using the PNTZSET.EXE tool (figure 4).
Figure 4 - The PNTZSET tool
Both Windows 2003 Terminal Services and Citrix Presentation Server support time zone redirection. This feature enables a server-based ICA or RDP session to inherit the time zone setting of the client device. While this capability is useful in many cases, other scenarios may require that time zone assignments be centrally managed and enforced. For example, someone in the Accounting Department who’s currently on vacation may be called upon in an emergency situation to access a time-sensitive financial application remotely from any available computer. Given this situation, there’s no guarantee that the redirected time zone will be the one required to run the application. Hence, centrally managing and enforcing the time zone assignments is more preferable and reliable than client time zone redirection.
Licensing
- Standalone per-server license
- Per concurrent user - Part of the vWorkspace Power Tools Edition
- Per concurrent user - Part of the vWorkspace Enterprise Edition