In this article I explain how you can use System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007 to find systems configured with an incorrect time zone, and then fix it via an advertisement. The SCCM database stores a system’s time in the same format stored in Windows.
One way to obtain the system’s time zone in Windows is to query for the CurrentTimeZone property of the Win32_ComputerSystem WMI class. The value returned will be number of minutes that the computer time is offset from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
For example, New York is 5 hours behind UTC when observing daylight saving. So when New York is in Eastern Daylight Time (EDT), a Windows system in New York will keep the system’s CurrentTimeZone setto ‐240, which represents 4 hours (divide 240 by 60 minutes) and the negative sign representing that it is behind UTC. When daylight savings is in effect, the system’s time will be set an hour behind (for a total of 5 hours behind UTC).
The correct time zone value stored in SCCM for a system in New York while observing daylight saving is ‐‐240. There are built‐in reports in SCCM that show you this time zone value. Sometimes the need may arise to fix the time zone on systems that have it set incorrectly. One way to remediate this is to create a collection that will be populated by systems with an incorrect time zone. In this example, I’ll create a collection that will have as members systems in New York with an incorrect value in the CurrentTimeZone property. If you have systems in multiple time zones, you can first create a collection that contains only computers in New York (you can base your collection on systems’ Organizational Unit in Active Directory or their IP subnet(s), and then when you create the collection with systems having an incorrect time zone in New York you just configure it to be limited to the New York collection.
The SQL query for this collection is
select SMS_R_SYSTEM.ResourceID,SMS_R_SYSTEM.ResourceType,SMS_R_SYSTEM.Name, SMS_R_SYSTEM.SMSUniqueIdentifier,SMS_R_SYSTEM.ResourceDomainORWorkgroup, SMS_R_SYSTEM.Client from SMS_R_System JOIN SMS_G_System_COMPUTER_SYSTEM on SMS_G_System_COMPUTER_SYSTEM.ResourceID=SMS_R_SYSTEM.ResourceID where SMS_G_System_COMPUTER_SYSTEM.CurrentTimeZone != '‐240'
Once the collection is populated, you can target it with an SCCM package that will run a program with
the following command to fix it:
Tzutil /s “Eastern Standard Time”
You don’t have to indicate that the package contains source files in Windows 7 as tzutil.exe is built‐in into it.
As systems in the collection successfully run the program, they’ll be removed from it when the collection evaluates next time (the image in this example has the evaluation to be performed once a day). As new systems are reported in the SCCM database with the incorrect time zone value, they’ll become members of the collection when it evaluates next time. Once they join the collection, they’ll receive the advertisement to run the Tzutil fix (as long as the advertisement hasn’t expired).
