We have taken over IT Support for a school, and they have 32 iPads and seemingly a user for each year group (so 6 users). When they sign into the iPads, it isn't signed into MS Word or MS Sharepoint automatically and the teachers would like the students to save their work to Sharepoint on the iPads. I don't want to have to sit there and sign into both apps on all 6 profiles for every iPad - there must be a way to do this through Meraki?
Effectively I'd like to assign a MS account to each one of the user accounts on the iPads. Screenshot below shows the profiles section on the device page on Meraki.
You should be able to utilize managed app configs and push a payload including username to the sharepoint app.
https://documentation.meraki.com/SM/Profiles_and_Settings/Using_the_Managed_App_Settings_Payload
The logins should require an MFA approval - so it should not be possible to use a managed app config.
You are right on or over the Microsoft licence limit of 5 devices per login.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-nz/microsoft-365/commerce/licenses/subscriptions-and-licenses?view=o3...
"If your subscription includes any of the following products, each person can install Microsoft 365 on up to five PCs or Mac, five tablets, and five phones."
I wouldn't use this approach because if it isn't already broken, if they get even slightly more devices the approach will fail. I suspect it only works now because they do a new sign-in every time - so they don't have to rely on devices remaining signed in. If you pre-sign them in it may well fail.
And there there is the legal and moral issue. They are in violation of their Microsoft licence agreement. Every individual user requires their own licence. It sounds like they are paying for 6 licences when they require a licence for every student (it is the student that needs the licence, not the device).
Education providers get MS licensing for free to some extent, its much more complicated then that but generally they get it for free although that might not be the case in the US.
How do you tackle this issue? Do you use a login per student, per class, per year, or something else?
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but this is not possible.
Whilst Managed app config would get you part of the way (provisioning the user with managed app config), the user would still need to authenticate, and, if you're using O365, then you're likely to be using modern authentication through a web interface, of which managed app config can't and doesn't support
To be clear: this is not a limitation of SM, nor iOS: It's an implementation issue with O365 and Modern Auth