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Polar Help Desk 5 FAQ General FAQ Incidents and Email FAQ Service Level Management (SLM) FAQ Reports FAQ Licensing FAQ

General FAQ

What is Polar Help Desk 5?

Polar Help Desk 5 is service management software designed to help you refine and accelerate the process of tracking, resolving and auditing incidents (calls) by sustaining the best practices for operating and implementing IT service support in companies.
As a web based software solution it is accessible at any time and from any place in the world.

Who should use Polar Help Desk 5 software solution?

Polar Help Desk 5 is intended for small businesses who need to organize or improve their customer support. It facilitates the adequate service delivery to the end-users whether they are external or internal customers.

Can we integrate Polar Help Desk 5 with our support email address?

Yes. You can integrate Polar Help Desk 5 with your support POP3 or IMAP email address and automatically convert emails to incidents. If your service user prefers email communication, one may do so, while your support staff retains the benefits of systematic incident tracking and management over the help desk software.

How can I reset my password?

If you have given your email address and it is in help desk database, all you have to do is go to login screen and click on I forgot my password link. If you didn’t then the only way to reset it is by contacting administrator to reset it manually.

How can I send a feature request for future version of Polar Help Desk?

We greatly appreciate any suggestions for new features. Please submit feature requests at support@polarsoftware.com. Our software engineers review these reports regularly and consider them when planning future product releases.

Can I try Polar Help Desk 5 before I buy it?

Yes. Fully functional version of Polar Help Desk 5 is installed here. You can also download Polar Help Desk 5 – 30 Day Free Trial with one named license from our web site.

How can I purchase Polar Help Desk?

The easiest way to purchase it is to place your order online here.

How do you deliver your products?

Polar software products are only available via ESD (Electronic Software Download).

How can I report a bug in application or an error in documentation?

Please submit bug reports, documentation errors, and feature requests at support@polarsoftware.com. Our software engineers review these reports and do their best to address these requests in the next product release cycle.

Where can Polar Help Desk Help files be found?

You can browse our help pages here.

Incidents and Email FAQ

Can Polar Help Desk 5 have multiple client interfaces?

Every customer has its own credentials that he uses to access the Help Desk through his/her web browser. At login he/she can see only their incidents and not the issues from other companies. However, if you would like somebody to have a possibility to see other incidents you can also set this up by modifying the permissions in the Administration Desktop.

So this all depends on your needs, using Roles you give different permissions to each group. If you would need some help in setting this up to tailor your requirements please let us know and we will be happy to assist you.

How often does Polar Help Desk 5 scheduler check for emails?

It checks for mail every 5 minutes by default.
You can change this setting in web.config file. Do not change any other settings or scheduler will not function properly.

How can I turn on or off notifications in Polar Help Desk 5?

You have to choose the notifications you want to be sent to help desk users. By default none of them is selected but you can configure Polar Help Desk to send many combinations of notifications. Different notification rules can be defined for different support teams. Notifications about an incident will be sent according to the email notification chosen for team assigned supporter is in. You will also need to enable email sending at email accout used by that support team.

Is it possible to customize email subject and body text of the notifications?

It  is possible to customize email subject and body text of email notification that is sent to customers and support technicians. Additionally, using simple scripting language for building and editing email templates, you can choose exactly which data about the incident change will be communicated.

What does each incident status mean?

Incident status will change during the course of its lifecycle. Various users will change the status of the incident from New status all through to Closed status. Every status has a state so that you can have better visibility and control over the lifecycle of specific incident. This state is used so that you can measure the time it took to start working or the time for solving the incident which is important for SLA time measurement.

There are two possible states in Polar Help Desk:

1. Accountable – This state means that the responsibility for the incident is on support staff. The counted time in this state is used to see how much time it has take from the beginning to the end of giving the support to a customer. The SLA time is active in this state.
2. Not Accountable – This state means that the responsibility for this incident isn’t on support staff, it is on a customer that has opened the incident (e.g. support staff is waiting for his response or confirmation for good issue solving). The time for giving the support to the customer is not counted in this state. The SLA time at this state is inactive, so no priorities will increase to a higher level in this state by themselves.

Description of each incident status and its state in Polar Help Desk:

• New – All new incidents and the ones that are reopened get this status. The state for this status is Accountable.
• In Progress – The incidents where support staff is working on a solving the issue. The state for this status is Accountable.
• Waiting – The incidents where support staff is waiting for feedback from customers. This state for this status is Not Accountable
• Resolved – This incident is solved but the support staff is waiting for the customer to answer if the solution suits him. The state for this status is Accountable.
• Completed – This status have all incidents that are solved. The state for this status is Not Accountable.
• Closed – This status is used for incidents that were closed without giving support. The state for this status is Not Accountable.

How can I turn off e-mail notifications that Polar Help Desk 5 sends me?

If you would like to turn off e-mail notifications click on My profile at the top right corner of help desk desktop and then uncheck Receive E-mail notifications. You will no longer receive e-mail notifications.

Polar Help Desk 5 is not automatically escalating incidents when the time limits are exceeded. What could be preventing it from escalating incidents?

First of all, you will need to check Working Hours for your Service Level. Incidents will only be escalated during Working Hours for your service level. Incident will not escalate while it is in Not accountable Status (Waiting, Completed or Closed).

Service Level Management (SLM) FAQ

Since the version can do SLA’s can we set the working day / working week so that elapsed times are reflected properly? Finally can you set the time taken to resolve a fault on the actual fault to look at the time support staff actual took to do work, rather than they opening and closing faults with no real indication of the work that was actually involved?

The time label is not showed on the incident (but you can see in the conversation history every step of the incidents life), however there are reports that are generated and will allow you the see the average time needed to complete the incident for example, among others.

What are Accounts?

Accounts are primarily used for Service Level Management. Based on a Account, a Service Level can be determined for the incident. Also, you can allow service users to see all incidents that are created by users who also belong to their Account, by setting it in Role their Account is in. This way one can allow a customer who belongs to the same company to see all incidents opened for their company.

Could you provide more details on the escalation? In the Service Level desktop, one can find the option to set the SLA Time Limit. When does this time out happen? Is it like the incident remains with status “New” for so much amount of time then the escalation mail is triggered?

The priority escalation time is in form of hh:mm (for example, 0:3 is 3 minutes).

• If an incident stays in an open status (new or in progress) for that amount of time it escalates to a higher priority (e.g. if the incident had low priority it escalates to medium)
• If you wish to send notifications to service user and/or current assignee and/or all group members to which the incident is assigned, you need to select that in settings of Email Notification which is used by assigned support team.
• Also, you have an option to notify, for example, only current assignee if SLA exceeded specified time for one priority and, for example, current assignee and/or service user for some other priority.

Reports FAQ

Can I create my own reports?

You can create custom reports through help desk interface using client side and server side java script.

Licensing FAQ

Can I buy concurrent licenses for Polar Help Desk 5?
We do not have concurrent licenses in Polar Help Desk 5, only named licenses: you can purchase named licenses instead.

What is the price of a new license of Polar Help Desk 5?

Please check the current pricing list here.  For more information on Polar Help Desk 5 pricing, please send email to support@polarsoftware.com.

Our company uses Polar Help Desk 4. Can we upgrade to Polar Help Desk 5?

Yes. You can upgrade and transfer you data from Polar Help Desk 4 to Polar Help Desk 5.  Please check the current pricing list here.  More detail upgrade instruction is to be found here on our wiki help.

How do I enter new license key?

Once you have obtained the new key, here is what you need to do to enter new key:

1. Log in to your helpdesk as administrator
2. Go to Administration > Licenses, enter new license key and save it.

Are the named support licenses transferable?

Yes, the named licenses are transferable; you can add or remove users from named users list anytime.

I have one named license. Does this mean that I can have one support person and as many service users as I need?

Yes, you can have unlimited number of customers — users that are ‘only’ service desk users and do not fall under the 1 named user in the license. They can be in multiple accounts and roles, for example one role will give them permissions to see incidents of their accounts and not only their own, other to see or edit some part of knowledge base, etc.

Our company is interested in the details of your source code licensing.

Polar Help Desk 5 Source License was designed for companies that need to add additional features to our product only for internal usage. Practically that means that this license is tied with one physical location, further more this license prohibits any reselling and redistribution of our product in any form.

Can I purchase an additional license?

To purchase an additional named license please follow the link and place your order for the Polar Help Desk 5 one named license. We will then send you a new license key that you should use to have all your licenses activated.