Short answer:
When you get your messages over the phone they will all be in the time zone the Unity server is setup in regardless of where the user is homed.

Longer answer:
When a message gets stored in Exchange (any message from any source, voice, fax etc…) it’s stamped in Greenwich Mean Time. There are actually several time stamps on a message: one for when it was originally sent, when it arrived at the home store, the last time it was edited and a few others that don’t show up anywhere in the UI. These are all stored in GMT.

It’s the client applications that are pulling the messages from the Exchange store that have the responsibility of translating the GMT times into the local time of the user. If you look at your time zones selection tab on your server config, you’ll see all the different zones have a +X or –Y hours tag on them… this is their deviation from GMT. As such when Outlook, for instance, opens an email from the Exchange server it translates the GMT into the time you have set on your workstation. If you change your time zone, you’ll notice all your email time stamps in Outlook change along with it.

For folks calling into Unity, however, we only have one time zone defined for the box at present. As such we use that one time zone to translate the timestamps on the voice mails we pull from Exchange. In your case folks calling from a different time zone will get time stamps that are off an hour (I assume).

That said, we are planning a “multiple time zones” feature for Unity such that each subscriber can be explicitly associated with their own time zone via the Unity SA. This way if you have users in multiple time zones being serviced by the same Unity box, everyone can get the proper time stamp translation when calling in over the phone. I don’t have a time frame I can give you on that right now, but it’ll probably be in the next drop after 2.4.5.


Jeff Lindborg
Unity Product Architect
Active Voice
jlindborg@activevoice.com
http://members.home.net/jlindborg