Timezones can be a complicated topic, so we've put together this simple example to help illustrate the StatusDashboard timezone functionality:
John Smith from Acme Widgets has recently signed up for a StatusDashboard account. John works out of the Acme Widgets San Francisco office, but Acme Widgets also has offices in New York and London. The first thing John does after signing up is to modify his user profile to set his timezone to US/Pacific because that is where he lives/works.
Acme Widgets is planning to perform maintenance on their corporate website on Saturday, beginning at 20:00 PST. John logs in to the StatusDashboard administrative portal and creates a scheduled maintenance event, setting the start time to 20:00 and the end time to 20:30. When the event is saved, John's timezone (US/Pacific) is attached to the event (in other words, the event is now timezone aware).
Jane Doe is a customer of Acme Widgets who resides in the New York area, which is in the US/Eastern timezone. Jane frequently uses the Acme Widgets corporate website to place orders for Widgets. On Saturday evening at 23:00 (local time, US/Eastern), Jane attempts to login to the Acme Widgets corporate website but notices that it is down for maintenance. She remembers that Acme Widgets had notified its customers about a new Status Dashboard service (status.acme.com) to keep their customers updated on system status (she also remembers receiving an email about the maintenance). She accesses the new status dashboard and sees the scheduled maintenance event. Jane is confused because the status dashboard indicates that the event is scheduled from 20:00 - 20:30 and it is currently 23:00 so the maintenance should have ended hours ago. Jane then remembers that she didn't set her timezone preference in the dashboard. She goes to the status dashboard, selects the timezone link, and sets her timezone preference to US/Eastern. The dashboard now shows all times in US/Eastern and Jane sees that the event is actually scheduled from 23:00 - 23:30.