Please allow a new kind of user-management option that disallows manual changing that directly uses the database, but still allows functions (such as user creation or password updating) that can be forwarded to external user management programs, such as Crowd.

The rationale behind this request is that Crowd integration recommends that "External User Management" is turned on, however turning this option on removes the links on JIRA for users to create accounts and/or update passwords. These links are very useful where they're already located inside of JIRA. It would be a frustrating experience for a user to find our JIRA instance, realize they need an account to create an issue, have to navigate elsewhere to create the account, and then return back to JIRA to create the issue.

In the absence of being able to internally forward these requests to Crowd, an alternate approach would be to supply an href to JIRA in a configuration file that would cause any user-update requests to go to that link (instead of the pre-existing JIRA page).