How do I manage the disconnect between Service Desk customers and AD?

Question

Simply put, all of our Service Desk customers are standalone customers in the JIRA user directory. As each member of our company emails a Service Desk project, JIRA will automatically create a user. Even though they are in Active Directory, an internal user will be created. We have a few doubles because of it, and quite a few standalone users. What I want to do is have JIRA automatically create Service Desk customers based on an ever-changing Active Directory group in such a way that a new user would NOT be created every time an end user emails a Service Desk project. How would I go about cleaning and setting this up? Thanks in advance.

fiberpi · Answer

It is currently set to off, as our Active Directory integration is set to authentication only. I'm guessing we should leave it as is per the suggestion. As a note, the doubled up users have the same name and email address, but the usernames are different. One would be just the email prefix, and the other would be the entire email address as the username. The latter is what is generated automatically when they email service desk.

Geoff Wilson · Answer

My first instinct would be to look at whether the External User Management option is set to On or Off, as On should prevent users from being able to be created in your application (provided that the Directory on user creation is not selecting JIRA Internal Directory).

External user management ON   OFF

Indicates that you are using user management from outside JIRA. JIRA will not display options for users to change their password, or edit their profile.
Note: With the 'authentication only' LDAP provider, this should be left off, as accounts are stored locally.