One of the challenges we had at a customer with Windows 365 Cloud PCs was ensuring that the system time zone aligns with the specific needs of the project team, rather than the local system from which the user is connecting from. When connecting to a Windows 365 Cloud PC it will redirect the time, this is something we needed to change but didn’t manage the device connecting from.
Understanding the challenge
By default, Windows 365 Cloud PCs inherit the time zone of the device connecting to the session, unless explicitly configured otherwise. This can lead to inconsistencies in scheduling, logging, and collaborative tasks if team members are working across different time zones in specific use cases.
To enforce a unified time on all Cloud PCs, we will use Intune Configuration Profiles to ensure that every user working on the project team has their Windows 365 Cloud PC set to the correct time zone.
In this case, users are connecting from locations in the London/Dublin (GMT Standard Time) zone, but the project requires all Cloud PCs to operate on Amsterdam time (W. Europe Standard Time – UTC+1, UTC+2 during daylight savings). Since we do not manage the local devices from which the sessions originate, all configurations must be applied via Microsoft Intune.
Configuring time zone via Intune
To enforce the W. Europe Standard Time (UTC+1, UTC+2 during daylight savings) setting on all Windows 365 Cloud PCs, we will use Intune Settings Catalog to configure two key settings.
Create a Settings Catalog Profile
Follow these steps to configure the time zone settings correctly via a settings catalog profile
Follow these steps to configure the time zone settings correctly . Go to Intune Admin Center. Here we will navigate to Devices | Configuration and click + Create new policy. Select platform Windows 10 and later and profile type Settings Catalog and click on Create
Fill in the name of the policy and description and click Next, click on + Add settings. Here we can search for the settings we need to control the time on the Cloud PC without the local redirection.
The first we need is Allow time zone redirection, and set it to disable the second setting will be the time zone we want to use. To find out which zones are available we can use Powershell.
Get-TimeZone -ListAvailable, this will give a list of all available zones on the device here we need the StandardName
in our case we needed to set the Amsterdam West Europe Time which is W.Europe Standard Time, now the policy will look he picture below
Conclusion
By enforcing W.Europe Standard Time through Intune Settings Catalog, we ensure a consistent time zone experience for all Windows 365 Cloud PC users working on the project. This eliminates inconsistency caused by local device time zones and enhances collaboration by standardizing timestamps across logs, applications.