Is there some way to bulk create Service Desk Customers (that don't count towards user licenses)?

[Ronald Marion]

This question is in reference to Atlassian Documentation: Setting up service desk users

I'm thinking of using Service Desk at a small college and I can't seem to find a way to bulk-create Customers (users with access only to the Service Desk portal).  I have several hundred existing users and it just does not seem practical to have each user sign up to use the portal; or to generate email invitations to each customer that is serviced by IT.  I used Service Desk at another gig about a year and a half ago and at that time, customers could be linked to Active Directory.  It appears that functionality has gone away.

One other question I have is whether email requests need to be tied to an existing customer account.  My current setup is designed to received vendor updates through service desk our application.  Since we don't have to create customer accounts in that application, those vendor updates easily flow through to the queues.

I'd like to get this figured out.  Service Desk doesn't seem viable if I have to manually create over 1000 individual customer accounts.  And I know my users won't take the time to visit the portal and set up their own accounts.

[Steven F Behnke]

You absolutely can link them to active directory accounts. Why do you think you can't?

Further, you could use the REST api to create users if you need to script it remotely for some reason. Or you could create a directory any other way that's compatible with JIRA service desk. There's no substantial limitation here besides a few service desk quirks.