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If you look into Site Map->Administration-Application->System Preferences there is a parameter defined “Universal Time Coordinated”. This parameter can either be TRUE or FALSE. By default this value is set to TRUE during Siebel Installation. The decision to set this parameter to either TRUE or FALSE is decided depending on whether your Siebel deployment is Global or Local.

Let me try to explain this by setting this parameter “Universal Time Coordinated” to different values.

1. Set this parameter to TRUE and create a record in Siebel Application. Now go to the database and check the time when this was created. This time will not be your local time. Instead the time you would have created would be UTC time which is same as GMT time. Now in Siebel check the time when it was created using About Record. You will see that the time is as per your Default Time Zone. What Siebel is doing here is that it takes the UTC time from the DB and converts it to Default Time Zone (which is your local time zone defined in Siebel) and displays that converted time. The advantage of having this is that the whole database will have one time zone even though the same data is created/updated by employees at different time zones.
   

2. Now set this parameter to FALSE and do a similar check as above. You will see that database will have your local time and same thing will show in Siebel. Here is no conversion happening. This is good and simple but the problem I see when you do this is that during Day Light Savings when you calculate time difference, it could be either be plus or minus of one hour. This can create confusion with time sensitive data. Also when employees around different time zone access this application they will have to do Time conversion themselves and Audit Trails could be misleading as well.

This parameter is very useful for Global Deployments where employees work at different time zones and if the deployment is at only one zone this parameter can be set to FALSE. Before you turn it to FALSE, be aware of the impact you might cause.

Also note that when you change this system preferences parameter value, you will need to restart services for it to take effect.

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