This Week's Picks - ArcGIS Enterprise #6
Happy New Year, fellow ArcGIS Enterprise aficionados! Moving into a new year, and a new decade, the subject of time has been on my mind… Of course, thinking about how much has changed in the past ten years. And traveling for the holidays made me think a lot about time zones. And this led me to think about web maps and time in ArcGIS Enterprise. Seriously. I'm a self-proclaimed geography nerd, I love this stuff.
Time in ArcGIS Enterprise is a bit of mystery, even for those who consider us who consider ourselves familiar with the product. With that in mind, let's remove the mystery and focus on time in ArcGIS Enterprise for the first edition of This Week's Picks - ArcGIS Enterprise in 2020. We'll be covering:
- Date and Time in ArcGIS Online (and ArcGIS Enterprise!)
- Visualizing time in your web maps with Arcade
- How to set your web service to use a specific time zone instead of UTC
1. Date and Time in ArcGIS Online (and ArcGIS Enterprise!)
This video by my fellow Product Advocacy Lead, Peter Klingman, is an awesome two-minute crash course on time zones, UTC and Unix time, and how this all works with ArcGIS Online. And don't let the name of this video deter you, though ArcGIS Online is the only product mentioned, the same principles apply to ArcGIS Enterprise. By the end of this video, you'll be able to answer why the time in your web map in California is different than the time for your buddy viewing the same web map in across the world in Germany. Take a moment and watch it for yourself here.
2. Visualizing time in your web maps with Arcade
Now you now understand how time works in ArcGIS Enterprise; you know that all dates are recorded and returned in UTC. But even with that information in mind, sometimes that's not enough and you need the time in your web map to display a specific way, reflecting a particular time zone. With that in mind, Arcade can be your best friend and help you convey the information you need to in your web maps. Take a look at this blog, which goes into use cases and workflows to make this happen.
3. How to set your web service to use a specific time zone instead of UTC
This whole time we've been talking about time in ArcGIS Enterprise, with principles that apply to ArcGIS Online as well. When navigating time, using Arcade within your web map may not be enough, maybe you want to set some rules on the web service itself. And this is where ArcGIS Enterprise offers you more time capabilities: you can set your web service to use a specific time zone instead of UTC. This can be done by specifying the time zone used in the database or through ArcGIS Server. This technical article goes into detail about changing these properties for the web service itself, always displaying the results in the desired time zone instead of UTC.
And with that, hopefully, time in ArcGIS Enterprise has been demystified for you! Thank you for reading and, as always, please feel free to reach out in the comments below 
if there are any outstanding questions. Be sure to check out This Week's Picks - ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Pro - and stay tuned for more This Week's Picks - ArcGIS Enterprise.