Using a template to manage Group Policies Only

[SulemaMartinez]

We are hoping to use templates to manage Meraki Group Policies under Network-wide. The main reason was so that every site would have the same content filtering and allowed sites without having to go into each network individually. I created a template and split it. We don't want to use templates for our firewalls. I want to use the switch template and only create the groups in Group Policies. Do I have to add switch configurations? My understanding is if the switch doesn't match the model in the template it is skipped. If there are no switches would it only apply the Group Policies to the network? Should I add a switch model we don't use  to be safe?

If this works, we want to map those policies to Active Directory Groups. Would those groups created in the template populate in Security &SD-WAN > Active Directory settings?

[Ryan_Miles · Accepted solution]

I'm not completely following you here or understand quite what outcome you're trying to achieve. However, I will say GPs in templates are for MX and MR and only would apply to MX and MR devices in networks which are bound to the template.

A switch in a network bound to a template also need to be bound to the switch template (inside the main template). But again, GPs don't apply to switches directly in anyway. There are ACL GPs for switches, but that's a different thing https://documentation.meraki.com/MS/Access_Control/Meraki_MS_Group_Policy_Access_Control_Lists.

[SulemaMartinez]

Thank you. I wanted to confirm that. We only want to manage the group policies with the templates.