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Trigger a workflow at a specific time but run the action at each user's local time zone.

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Posted on by anthonys123

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I have a flow that's currently scheduled to take place every weekday at 4:00PM Eastern Time. This is supposed to be an end-of-day prompt in Teams so it's a bit awkward for staff in California and Hawaii. I've been using CoPilot to help with this but the instructions were not working. I found a video on YouTube where I found the potential solution I'm posting here. I'm waiting on a test flow to run to see if it's successful. In the meantime, I'm here to ask for help and to check my work.

My test is manually triggered.

It's getting the user's time zone from a Dataverse table I've made for this workflow.

It then runs Apply To Each for each user (list in table).

The test is just converting the time zone and running a Delay Until.

The part I'm stuck on is Convert Time Zone. When I did this in a way that made sense to me, it was just giving me the current UTC time and triggering Delay Until right away. When I swapped the Source and Destination time zones and ran a test, it has continued to run. I assume it's waiting to go through all time zones so it's going to take a few hours to finish.

Can someone confirm this screenshot from my test looks like it will accomplish my goal? Base Time (Compose) is 2024-09-04 2:12 PM

I would think Source should either be my local time or UTC time and Destination would be the user's time zone.

As I said, this just pushed right through the whole workflow right way.

EDIT: As described here, this is not working for me. Convert a time zone - Power Automate | Microsoft Learn

In practice, I'm not sure what the best time zone is to trigger the flow. I'm thinking I should trigger it every day at 16:00:00 UTC and have the flow figure out the local time to proceed.

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Building flows

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Nived_Nambiar 18,129 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Hi,

One thing i don't understand here is parameters passed to convert timezone action

what is input in the compose action ? could you explain more around that ?

Also another way to approach this would be to create a scheduled flow which runs in UTC timezone at a desired interval, then use a excel/SP List/Dataverse datasource which stores the work end timings for different locations in UTC format, i meant the time. For example, if the work ending time is 5pm in India, its UTC time would be 11:30am, like below

Now when flow runs, it checks whether the current time in HH:mm format is present under Hour column using filter query, if found, it will loop through the filtered rows and send teams notification.

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David_MA 12,966 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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I would use an expression to convert the current UTC time to the user's time zone. To get the user's time zone, you can make this call to the graph API: https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users/user.email@domain.com?$select=mailboxSettings. You can parse out the time zone value and then use that in the expression and save it to a variable (UserTimeZone). You would use this expression: formatDateTime(convertTimeZone(utcNow(), 'UTC', variables('UserTimeZone')), 'yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss') and you can use that in your delay until action.

I think you may have issues using this in an Apply to Each with the delay until. It would probably be better to put this into a solution and create a manually triggered flow that handles the steps after the delay. Then call the child flow for each user so that separate instances run for each user.

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