Timely information in NOTES.INI

Timely information in NOTES.INI

[Editor's note: When planning this column, we suspected there would be a lot of interest in information about NOTES.INI. But we've been more than a little surprised by the tremendous response we've received so far. Not knowing what to expect, we guessed that we'd get 10 or so queries per month. But in the month following the publication of the first "Ask Professor INI" column, you sent in well over 100 queries. Obviously interest is high!

The questions you've submitted have been great, ranging from the general to the very specific. We will group together many of the questions by topic to form the basis for future columns, and we will answer other, more specific questions in the column as time and space permit. This is how we've always envisioned the column should work, and we're excited to be able to provide this service to you.

In reviewing your e-mails, however, we've noticed that some of them seem to expect a more immediate answer. We realize such time-critical questions may not "keep" during the several months it may take to work them into a future column. And unfortunately, we're not equipped to personally answer questions with individual, immediate replies. So if you need an immediate response to a question, we recommend you post it in the Notes/Domino Gold Release forum where someone from the general Notes community might be able to help, or contact Lotus Customer Support.

We hope you'll continue the high volume of responses to "Ask Professor INI." Your questions are essential to this column and ensure that it provides the most critical and useful NOTES.INI information possible.]

What better time than the New Year to learn about NOTES.INI time and date settings? There are several NOTES.INI variables that allow you to control date and time information in Notes. You can change most date and time settings, on both the server and the client, using the Notes client or Domino Administrator user interfaces (UI), or through the operating system. In fact, you should use the Domino Administrator or Notes client user interface to change NOTES.INI settings whenever possible; however, there are some variables, including some described in this article, that do not have a corresponding user interface setting and therefore need to be changed in the NOTES.INI file itself.

Let's start with information about the NOTES.INI time and date variables, and then move on to answer some specific time and date questions.

Controlling the format of time and date information
There are variables that determine how the date and time appear in Notes and Domino. Domino administrators in countries other than the United States, especially, may want to change the time and date format to reflect the format they are used to. The following variables let Domino administrators change these settings on their Domino servers. The only way to change these settings is through editing the NOTES.INI file.

ClockType
ClockType, for UNIX servers only, specifies whether the Domino server clock displays time in 12-hour format (AM and PM) or 24-hour format (sometimes called military time). A value of 12_HOUR sets the clock type as 12-hour; a value of 24_HOUR sets the clock type as 24-hour. If this setting is not used, the Domino server displays 12-hour time. The syntax is ClockType=value.

DateOrder
DateOrder lets administrators change the date format for any server platform. You can specify the order in which you want the month (M), date (D), and year (Y) to appear. The syntax is DateOrder=value, where the value is any permutation of DMY. The default order is MDY.

For example, to change the date format to that used in the United Kingdom, where the day comes first, you enter the following in your NOTES.INI file:

DateOrder=DMY

This will give you dates in the format 29.11.2000. Conversely, a value of MDY would render that date 11.29.2000.

DateSeparator and TimeSeparator
You can also choose the time and date separators you want to use, by using the variables DateSeparator and TimeSeparator. You can use any characters you want as separators. For example, if you enter the following settings in your NOTES.INI file:

DateOrder=DMY
DateSeparator=/

then the date will be rendered as 29/11/2000. Similarly, you could set your time as follows:

ClockType=24_hour
TimeSeparator=:

Then a time value of 2 pm, for example, would be rendered as 14:00:00.

Designating time zones and daylight-saving time
With one exception, time zone and daylight-saving time (DST) settings are made through the Domino Administrator or Notes client user interface. We recommend that you read more about these settings and how to use them in the Iris Today article "Keeping Time: How Notes handles time zones and daylight-saving time."

We will review related NOTES.INI variables briefly here: TimeZone, DST, and DSTlaw. You may never have to implement any of these variables in your NOTES.INI file, depending on the platforms you use. These NOTES.INI settings are used in all versions of Domino and Notes, up to and including R4.6. In R5, however, these variables became less vital because, wherever possible, Notes and Domino obtain time zone and DST information from the operating system, rather than NOTES.INI.

The following table shows when these variables are used in R5 on various platforms:

	TimeZone	DST	DSTlaw
Notes for Windows	Not necessary; time zone derived from OS	Not necessary; DST settings derived from OS	Not necessary; DST settings derived from OS
Notes for Mac	Not necessary; time zone derived from OS	Not necessary; DST settings derived from OS	Required*
Domino for Windows	Not necessary; time zone derived from OS	Not necessary; DST settings derived from OS	Not necessary; DST settings derived from OS
Domino for non-Windows platforms	Required	Required	Required*
* The DSTlaw setting is required only if your region observes DST and your DST start and end dates are not the standard dates shipped with Notes or Domino. For example, if you are located in the United States and use the US English version of Notes, you never have to set DSTlaw. See the discussion of DSTlaw below.

TimeZone
The TimeZone variable specifies the time zone for a server or client. The setting sets an offset from Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). Time zones begin with GMT and move westward. The time zones can be 15, 30, 45, or 60 minutes apart (not all zones are an hour apart). The syntax is TimeZone=value. For example, TimeZone=8 specifies Pacific Standard Time, which is 8 time zones from GMT.

For Notes versions up to and including R4.6, and for Domino R5 on non-Windows platforms, the initial TimeZone setting is defined during the client or server setup procedure. On a client, you set this option in the local time zone field in the Location document, and on a server, you set it in the local time zone field in the Server document. The client uses the offset as well as DST rules to determine how to render a date/time field.

DST
Setting DST can be a bit trickier. As indicated in the table above, you do not need to set this variable at all for Windows clients and servers, as Notes and Domino use the Windows DST settings.

DST specifies whether a system observes DST; the default is for the system to observe DST. When you select this option, the created/modified time for documents created or modified during daylight-saving time are time-stamped one hour later than the server's system time. The syntax is DST=value. Your options are 0 - do not observe daylight-saving time, or 1 - observe daylight-saving time.

For Notes versions up to and including R4.6, and for Domino R5 on non-Windows platforms, the initial DST setting is defined during the client or server setup procedure. On a client, you set this option in the Daylight-saving time field in the Basics section on the Advanced tab of the Location document, and on a server, you set it in the Daylight-saving time field in the Server document.

DSTlaw
DSTlaw defines the DST rule for where you are but not for other places. DSTlaw specifies when daylight-saving time (DST) is observed and is used on both servers and clients. Not all countries have the same DST rules, and some countries determine the DST period on an annual basis, instead of using the same dates each year. In these cases, DSTlaw allows users in these countries to change their DST settings on the Domino server to the settings for the current year. By default, the DST period is defined as the first Sunday in April to the last Sunday in October, which is the period during which DST is observed in the United States. The syntax for this variable is:

DSTlaw=begin_month, begin_week, begin_day, end_month, end_week, end_day

The variables begin_month, begin_week, and begin_day define the month, week, and day, respectively, when DST begins. The variables end_month, end_week, and end_day define when DST ends. Months are 1 (January) through 12 (December) and days are 1 (Sunday) through 7 (Saturday). Weeks are 1 or -1; to indicate the first week of the month, you specify 1,and to indicate the last week of the month, you specify -1. For example, the default settings—the first Sunday in April to the last Sunday in October—look like this:

DSTlaw=4 1 1 10 -1 1

This defines DST as beginning in April (4), on the first week (1), on Sunday (1); and ending in October (10), on the last week (-1), on Sunday (1).

There is no UI equivalent for this variable, so any changes to this variable require that you edit the NOTES.INI file.

Gone but not forgotten: DST_Begin_Date and DST_End_Date
Some Notes users may be familiar with DST_Begin_Date and DST_End_Date variables. These allowed you to specify the absolute date that DST begins and ends, respectively (compared with DSTlaw, which sets relative begin and end dates). At this point, DST_Begin_Date and DST_End_Date are considered obsolete and are mentioned here for informational purposes only.

Q&A
Now, let's look at some specific time and date NOTES.INI questions.

Q: We have set up our servers and clients (all 13,000 of them) to have the UseNotesTimeZone=1 variable in the NOTES.INI files. This was the recommendation from Lotus when we explained we wished Notes R5 to remain DST ignorant.

Despite much research, I have yet to find the definitive answer as to what this setting is actually doing. Can you tell me?

Disclaimer: UseNotesTimeZone, despite being a new variable in R5, is not documented because there is no commitment to supporting it in future versions of Domino. Any mention of this setting here is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as a commitment to support it.

UseNotesTimeZone=1disables Domino's use of the operating system's time zone settings. Setting UseNotesTimeZone=1causes your Domino server to revert to pre-R5 time zone behavior. Setting it to 0 causes Domino to use the operating system's time zone settings. When you set UseNotesTimeZone=1, you must also add the TimeZone, DST, and DSTlaw settings as required by your time zone.

Note that you can only use UseNotesTimeZone on platforms where Domino is capable of using the operating system's time zone settings. This includes all members of the Windows family. On Solaris, OS/2, and other platforms, UseNotesTimeZone is ignored.

All that being said, we wonder about your stated goal for "Notes 5 to remain DST ignorant." In the past, some large corporations have found it difficult to configure all their Notes clients and Domino servers across time zones to have the correct DST start and end dates. Previous versions of Notes and Domino defaulted to US (or UK) start and end dates and required all other countries to set the DSTlaw setting in NOTES.INI. Some corporations found it easier to simply set DST=0 and pretend not to observe DST. The downside of this approach is that it will cause various off-by-one-hour problems in Notes Calendaring and Scheduling. This is precisely why R5 now uses the operating system's time zone settings by default. Corporations who, in the past, have configured Notes and Domino to be "DST ignorant" should reconsider their reasons for doing so. If possible, they should come up with a plan to correctly observe DST as they deploy R5.

Q: In Israel, the start and end dates of daylight saving do not conform to European standards, and in fact, are not known from year to year more than a few months in advance. In previous versions of Notes, we used DSTlaw to set the start and end dates, but everything I read about R5 says that it will take these from the operating system, which in the case of Windows 95 and Windows NT are not settable.

Can you advise us on whether and how we can use NOTES.INI in this case?

In R5, DSTlaw became obsolete on Windows platforms, for all intents and purposes, because Notes and Domino for R5 use Windows' time zone settings by default. As described earlier, there are a few countries that legislate DST dates on an annual basis—Israel is one such country and France is another. If you live in such a country, there is a NOTES.INI solution, although we mention it reluctantly, as it involves the use of the unsupported variable UseNotesTimeZone=1 (see the previous question for more information and a disclaimer). With this variable, you can disable Domino's use of the operating system's time zone settings and then set DSTlaw as you did prior to R5.

You add the following line to your NOTES.INI:

UseNotesTimeZone=1

You then need to set the TimeZone, DST, and DSTlaw settings in NOTES.INI (as described above).

You might also try to contact Microsoft for help. It is true that there is no user interface available to set the DST dates for Windows 95 and Windows NT, but the dates are stored in a Windows registry setting. Microsoft might be able to help you update the registry setting.

Q: We have two partitioned servers running on an AS/400. The AS/400 server is set to EST and the coordinated universal offset time is set to -5:00 hours. One server is for our Miami office and the second server is for our Missouri office and is set to CST. I have the appropriate time zone settings set in the location section of the Server document, but the Missouri server is using the system time, which is EST.

Is there an INI setting that will let you specify a time adjustment from the operating system time? Or one that will make an adjustment for time zones ?

There is no way to specify a Domino time adjustment from operating system time. One solution to this problem is that you simply set both of your partitioned servers to EST. Even though one server is for users in your Missouri office, unless the server is serving Web clients, there is no reason why the server has to pretend it is in CST. As long as the Notes clients in your Missouri office are properly configured for CST, they should work with the Domino server without problems.

Q: I am in Switzerland, and the following settings are in my Notes 4.57g for OS/2 NOTES.INI:

TimeZone=-1
DST=1
ZONE_SET=1

More than twice in a short period, I got some feedback from colleagues in Switzerland and Germany that my Notes mail shows a time difference of 4 hours! The TZ setting in the CONFIG.SYS file of my OS/2 Warp 4 with the accurate FP 14 looks like this:

SET TZ=CET-1CES,3,-1,0,7200,10,-1,0,0,3600

I assume that time zone settings of my colleagues in Switzerland and Germany are correct. How do I check my NOTES.INI settings to see if they are correct?

The problem described here may not be a Notes client problem at all. The PostedDate item on a mail message is derived from the Domino server's time, not the Notes client time. Usually, the above problem occurs when the Domino server has the correct time according to the local time, but its time zone settings are incorrect. This introduces an off-by-n-hour problem for all users that submit mail to the server. You should have your system administrator check the time settings on your Domino server.

Do you have a NOTES.INI questions? Send it in to Professor INI. We'll answer as many questions as we can in future "Ask Professor INI" columns. Keep in mind, however, that we may not be able to answer every question, nor can we quickly respond to requests that require immediate attention. If you need an immediate response to a question, we recommend you post it in the Notes/Domino Gold Release forum where someone from the general Notes community might be able to help, or contact Lotus Customer Support.