Is there a way to schedule tasks in windows specifying a specific time zone?

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I need to schedule several tasks to run, where each needs to run at a specific local time in a different city. For example, one job might need to run at 19:00 New York City, and another needs to run at 08:00 Berlin.

The problem is not only does daylight savings change the UTC time these jobs will run, but different cities adjust their clocks on different days, so the offset between different cities is also constantly changing.

Is there any way to do this in Windows without writing custom scripts? Is there any commercial software package that can handle this?

Chuu

Posted 2013-03-12T15:17:02.230

Reputation: 549

2I don't know about third party software, but windows certainly can't handle that. You'd have to work out the time difference for each city and keep up to date with clock changes and adjust your jobs accordingly using windows alone. – Simkill – 2013-03-12T15:23:46.213

Answers

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Why would you need the tasks run from one particular host? why not just run the tasks on each system and if needed host the script sources on one network associated volume. when the script finishes it can set whatever notifications and write them back out to the share or Each host already maintains its own time sync for local needs.

It would seem that you are making your work harder by including an unnecessary restriction.

Rowan Hawkins

Posted 2013-03-12T15:17:02.230

Reputation: 276

We have a server that needs to run a task at 9am in the local time of each of our offices. It would be cool to be able to schedule this in Windows Task Scheduler and have it know when daylight savings time kicks in for each time zone – Greg – 2018-04-03T02:26:13.907

Computers wont know when daylight savings kicks in unless your os issues the time change. Windows certainly does track daylight savings time, provided the time zone configured uses it. Ntp doesn't really associate UTC. NTP is really seconds since the last time reset. If all of your computers are configured for their local time zones then scheduled jobs will occur based on that information. – Rowan Hawkins – 2018-04-07T13:17:44.317

The reason some diverse companies use UTC is so human read logging is in sync between hosts. Computer based logging doesn't need that crutch, but it all depends on the intelligence of the programers and if the consolidated log converts time to some local standard or leaves it as the ntp epoch time and adjusts based on the reference of the viewer. – Rowan Hawkins – 2018-04-07T13:24:38.953

if you are using the local time zone on your systems, which you should be btw. Then don't schedule jobs to start between 1am and 2am. Doing so would cause the job an issue during the changeover time. In the forward adjustment the job would not run, in the back adjustment it would run twice. Frankly I think the whole daylight savings time is is an out moded concept. Nobody I know likes the time change, the loss of productivity from forcing everybody to change internal scheduling by an hour twice a year. – Rowan Hawkins – 2018-04-07T13:44:24.190

1I think you're missing my point. We have to run a process from a server in our main office multiple times a day. The time lines up with 9am in the local office around the world. We can't run the process in the office, it has to run from a central server, so we can't just change the timezone to the local timezone of each office (it is the local timezone of the main office). It would be cool to have a feature in Windows Task Scheduler to say "Run this at 9am in Chicago". – Greg – 2018-04-07T19:59:05.717

The solution is to setup a job on the remote server that says at 9am local go run this command \mainserver\jobforremoteserver\job.ps1. – Rowan Hawkins – 2018-04-07T20:08:19.427

Asked: 2013-03-12T15:17:02.230

Viewed: 3 128 times

Active: 2016-12-15T22:48:44.510