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When Exchange Server sends a meeting request, it puts the time zone's name in the request form. This convention is OK if everyone is familiar with the time zone (e.g., Eastern Standard Time—US and Canada). A problem arises if your time zone's name has a geographical name that is not your geographical location.
For example, if your network has the time zone Mexico City/Tegucigalpa but you don't live in Mexico City or in Tegucigalpa, a meeting request for a meeting at 3:00 p.m. Mexico City/Tegucigalpa simply confuses your users. I used the following method to change all the time-zone names across my network (Windows 95 and Windows NT) to a name that users could understand more easily:
- I opened Regedit and went to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Time Zones\<Mexico Standard Time>
in which <Mexico Standard Time> is your local time zone.
- I double-clicked the Display key (Mexico Standard Time) and renamed it with a term users could understand intuitively (e.g., Home Office Time or the name of your geographical location—Hora de Costa Rica).
- I used the Registry, Export Registry File command and saved the file as hometime.reg in the NT Logon Script directory (\\SERVER1\Admin$\SYSTEM32\REPL\ IMPORT\SCRIPTS).
- I modified the NT logon script to contain the following lines:
if exist C:\HOMETIME.VAR goto CHANGED \\server1\netlogon\HOMETIME.REG ECHO * > C:\HOMETIME.VAR :CHANGED
This modification causes every machine to automatically change the name of its time zone at the next logon. The hometime.var file ensures that the change occurs only once. The users on my network have liked this feature very much.
