Change Time Zone on Domain Machines using Group Policy and tzutil.exe

To change time zone on domain machines we can use a tool called tzutil made available by Microsoft from Windows Server 2008. It can be used to display and set time zone on a Windows machine.

To run it on all domain machines, I simply used it in a login script

Here's the procedure:

Open Group Policy Management from Server Manager and right click on the domain/OU where you want to create the new Group Policy Object (GPO)

Click on "Create a GPO in the domain, and link it here", name it, then right click on the created GPO and click "edit"

In the Group Policy Management Editor, go to User Configuration > Policies > Windows Settings > Scripts(Logon/Logoff)

Right click on Logon and click "Properties"

Click on Add > Browse

Right click on the popped up window and create a new text file.
Edit the text file and type:

tzutil /s "Central Standard Time"

Note: I used "Central Standard Time" which can be replaced with the time zone you want to set. To get a complete list, open command prompt and type

tzutil /l

Once done, save the file with a .bat extension. Select the file, click OK and you are done. Close the Group Policy Management Editor.

You can leave the Security Filtering of the the GPO to "Authenticated Users" so that the script executes no matter which domain user logs in.

To see the changes you can run gpupdate /force on a domain machine.

Once the group policy updates on all machines, and you have the correct time zone, you can disable the GPO to avoid running it unnecessarily every time a user logs in.