The operating system where M-Business Server is installed provides date and time information for all user synchronizations and for all transactions updating the M-Business Anywhere database.

Web servers supplying content for M-Business channels provide date and time information for requested channel pages that M-Business Server uses to manage caching of those pages.

Applications that supply database information to Web pages that are part of M-Business channels control any date and time information that is included in channel pages.

Applications running in M-Business Client, on mobile devices to which M-Business Server downloads M-Business channel content, control date and time information when users enter or update application data on the mobile device—for a variety of reasons, the application should store the date/time at which the information is uploaded to the application server, in place of any date/time information available from the device OS.

Daylight saving time – Run all components that support M-Business Anywhere so that they are not subject to daylight saving time; run them on a constant clock, such as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) or Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

You can use one of these standards for date and time values in all components that supply M-Business channel content to M-Business Server, then let the application code that runs in M-Business Client on mobile devices be responsible for conversions to users' local time zones, including adjustments for daylight saving time.

Device OS time – For a variety of reasons, it is best to rely on date/time information provided by the device OS as little as possible.

When users update information on a mobile device, the date/time information that really counts is the time at which the updated information is synchronized with the back-end database. If date/time information for when the user updates information on the device is stored at all, it should be treated as secondary to the date/time that the information is uploaded to the application server in a synchronization.

M-Business Server time zone – The choice of which time zone M-Business Server uses is unfortunately often based on where the company's headquarters are located at the time the server is first created. This causes no problems, as long as the company does not have operations in other time zones.

For larger companies that has operations in multiple time zones, and for any smaller company that may grow into multiple time zones or move its headquarters to a different time zone, the best approach is to establish a company standard early on that the server runs under UTC and all clients are responsible for translating from UTC to local time.