Polar Help Desk supports Microsoft Active Directory integration. It allows you to:

1. Import users and contact from Active Directory.
2. Authenticate users and contacts by using their Active Directory password (Windows logon username/password)
3. Authenticate users and contacts using NTLM

There are 3 authentication types supported:

1. Active Directory (directly)
2. NTLM (your Windows logon)
3. Polar Help Desk Database

For Active Directory and NTLM authentication types, username must match the Active Directory full username. This is DOMAIN_NAME\UserName (eg. POLAR.COM\Joe).

When Polar Help Desk needs to verify the users credentials, it will connect to the domain (DOMAIN_NAME part of the username) and test username/password.

NTLM is enabled by disabling Anonymous Access rights from your web site and enabling Windows Authentication.

Authentication procedure

When authenticating users via login page, Polar Help Desk will first:

1. Attempt to authenticate user against Active Directory password.
2. If that fails, it will attempt to authenticate against Polar Help Desk password.

To login into Polar Help Desk using NTLM authentication, you need to open URL http://website/loginad.

If your computer is already connected to your local network, it will immediately log you into Polar Help Desk with those credentials. Note that username returned by NTLM must be identical to username that is in the database.

Importing from Active Directory

When importing form Active Directory you must specify the following fields:

1. Active Directory Path (LDAP://server_name/dc=domain_name)
2. Active Directory Username and Password (if needed to access Active Directory)
3. Active Directory Filter – you can use these filter examples to get user data:
1. (objectClass=User)
2. (&(objectCategory=person)(objectClass=User))
4. User or Contact Template - defines role/team/account etc for new users/contacts.
5. Translation Table – rules to convert data from Active Directory.
6. Domain Name - when users are imported, their usernames must be in "DOMAIN_NAME\Username" format.

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