iPhone Calendar invites and incorrect time zones

Todd1561

I'm having some issues with calendar invites. I have 2 users in my Grommunio community system. Both users are using iPhones with ActiveSync and Outlook on windows connected by MAPI. Both users and all their devices as well as the Grommunio appliance are in the US Eastern time zone and are configured as such. When either user invites the other to an event they create using their iPhone the event shows as GMT in the other persons Outlook and thus shows the event occurring 4 hours later than reality. The event shows properly on all iPhones and properly in the creators Outlook. It seems something is wrong with the way the invitation is being crafted. I also tested inviting an outside user using MS Office 365 to an event I create using my iPhone and my Grommunio account, the invite works properly for them. I also note that in the Outlook invitation they get there's a message saying "This meeting has been adjusted to reflect your current time zone. It was initially created in the following time zone: tzone://microsoft/Utc". I don't get this notice on invitations sent to my Grommunio account. So it appears Microsoft Office 365 is doing some processing to correct this issue before it gets to the user?

It's important to note that this issue only occurs with recurring events. This also only happens with invites created on the iPhone, if I create the event in Outlook on Windows everything is fine. Any idea what's going on here?

Todd1561

Also worth noting that these problematic events show properly in the Grommunio web interface. So it's just events created on the iPhone and then viewed in Outlook. Also, I have an Office 365 account to test with and when I create events using that account on my iPhone they work properly. So this is definitely an issue unique to Grommunio.

kslt90

Todd1561

it´s a problem between outlook and grommunio. I also faced issues with timezone in grommunio calendar.
E.g. i create a full day appointment in grommunio and on my android phone (i use Nine Mail App) the appointment is shown correctly. But in outlook the appointment is shown one day earlier. If i change the appointment from a full day appointment to an appointment from e.g. 26.08. 00:00 to 29.08. 00:00 it´s shown correctly in outlook.

If i create a full day appointment in outlook, for e.g. friday the appointment in grommunio starts on friday 2:00 and ends on saturday 2:00 so there is ashift of 2 hours and it looks like this:

On my Debian 12 server i use the timezone CEST (UTC +2) and it seems that the full day appointments are set to UTC which causes this shift of 2 hours.

There are several posts in the grommunio community forum which report issues with timezone in calendar appointments.

Todd1561

Thanks for the reply. This is disappointing, I've jumped around to a couple different email/groupware systems for my small home deployment because everything I've tried seems to have some problem with calendaring. I was hoping Grommunio was going to solve that. I'm not sure why calendaring is so difficult to nail down.

What are you doing as a workaround? Your situation doesn't even sound usable. I haven't had any problems with regular events, whether "all day" events or not. The only issue I've seen are invites to recurring events.

It's too bad because you really start to lose confidence in the system when problems like this occur. I keep a lot of important meetings and events in my calendar and depend on it to remind me properly. :/

Todd1561

I notice I get this error in the /var/log/grommunio-sync/grommunio-sync-error.log file when creating an event:
/usr/share/grommunio-sync/lib/grommunio/mapiprovider.php:2353 unpack(): Type l: not enough input, need 4, have 0 (2) /usr/share/grommunio-sync/lib/utils/timezoneutil.php:1143 Trying to access array offset on value of type bool (2) TimezoneUtil::FillTZNames() submitted TZ array does not have a bias /usr/share/grommunio-sync/lib/utils/timezoneutil.php:1284 Trying to access array offset on value of type bool (2) /usr/share/grommunio-sync/lib/utils/timezoneutil.php:1285 Trying to access array offset on value of type bool (2) /usr/share/grommunio-sync/lib/utils/timezoneutil.php:1287 Trying to access array offset on value of type bool (2) /usr/share/grommunio-sync/lib/utils/timezoneutil.php:1288 Trying to access array offset on value of type bool (2)