I just ran into a variation on this behavior that was initially quite baffling. I am importing a date field that is really just a date, not a date/time per se. I'm on the West Coast, and our instance is set to PST. I imported dates like this:
- 09/23/2013
- 01/02/2014
I then looked at the data by double-clicking a contact record. The dates I saw in the Field Details view appeared to be off by a day, was quite surprising:
- 9/22/2013
- 1/1/2014
I now figured out, thanks to this discussion, that there are several things going on. First, it's clear that Eloqua assumes a midnight time value if none is specified. That makes sense. Then, Eloqua stores the dates as EST. However, when Eloqua displays the dates to me, it tries to help by doing so in my local time zone, i.e., PST. Hence the displayed times are three hours earlier than what imported, i.e.:
- 09/22/2013 9:00 pm
- 01/01/2014 9:00 pm
Then, depending on how you look at the date, Eloqua may show the full time (date and hh:mm), or just the date (which ends up being rather confusing).
As a product suggestion, it would be nice to let us set the assumed time zone for date/times in the database. Meanwhile we will just stay aware of this.
Andy