One of those things I’ve been blissfully unaware of until pointed out by a customer, and now I can’t unsee or live with it. The ‘Event time zone’.

There is a magical ‘Time zone’ field in Dynamics 365 which is used for Events in Customer Insights - Journeys. Technically speaking in the background it all works great, the time is correctly converted to UTC and shows as expected for calendar invite timings etc BUT the actual name of the GMT offset time zone e.g. GMT+10 is only correct for half the year in any region that uses daylight savings… doh!

Why do I care?

When you include this in your email to show the event time zone of the event, it doesn’t look too smart! And the long format label is pretty cringe worthy too. So lets create a field for the pretty and year round correct GMT offset time zone that can be used in event communications, with style. This post will show you how to create a simple Power Automate flow to generate a correct and neater time zone label for all your events.

A Child Flow for Dataverse Time Zone Conversion

I do love a good child flow. Instead of creating the logic tied to the event only, I have created it as a child flow that can be used from any Dataverse table using time zones.

Use the child flow to update the Event time zone GMT label

Now we can generate the label for any given date and time zone code, we can now use this to update the event GMT offset label field.

Use the field in email dynamic content

The ‘Event registration created’ trigger is great for using in a journey that spans multiple events with completely dynamic content. Now with a year round correct and concise time zones too!