Best way to use tags and deploy apps

[GabBlais]

Hello everyone,

I'm kind of new to Meraki and never had a formation before.I've read a bit there and there but not enough to be confident about this next step. Right now our system is hadling 25 IOS devices (Ipad). The current method we have is to apply a new tag to a new device (basically his name) and then add this tag to the apps we want to deploy. For those 25 devices, we have around 120 apps. Right now the users can install whatever they want and we mainly handle the paid apps, not the free ones.

In the next couple of weeks, we are going to have around 80 more Ipads, and couple 100-200 more in the next couple of months or so. We were also asked to block the users from installing free apps and deploy them ourselves. Now, I don't know what's the best way to use tags in this case. Instead of using them to identify one Ipad, and then add the tag in every single apps we search for, I was thinking of creating a tag for each app and identifying each Ipad with 30 to 120 tags, depending of the numbers of apps wanted. That seems to be a bit faster since I can enter the tags in one window, instead of searching for each app indivudualy in order to add the Ipad tag.

I also want to add that the Ipads are going to be distributed is differents classes, around 15-20 by classes. I may try to create a tag for a specific class, deploy all common apps to them, and handle the rest app by app (tag by tag). But there can be a lot of differents apps inside the same class.

Now, is this the best method I can do or am I missing something?

Is there a limited amount of tags I can use on one device? What about on one app?

Thanks a lot for your help !

[PhilipDAth]

Surely you can "group" the users, and use a tag per group?

For example, the "sales" group, who need these applications ....

[GabBlais]

Thanks for the replay Philip! As I am working in schools, there's no such thing. Each class will ask for they're own apps, and I know even in the same class, there going to be a lot of different apps deployed. I still think that's the best way to go, regrouping the common apps in one class, one tag for this class, and deploy the rest manualy. But I can't be sure for now if these "common" apps are going to be 40% or 95% of all apps.

I was mainly wondering if I was going in the good direction or if I was missing something really important

[GabBlais]

Update : I've been searching around in the meraki documentation for a couple days now and I just found a doc that I had not seen before : https://documentation.meraki.com/SM/Deployment_Guides/Education_Deployment_Guide_and_Best_Practices

I'll start by doing a bit of reading on this but I'm pretty sure that's exactly what I was searching for.

[vassallon]

@GabBlais As someone with experience pushing apps in schools I will weigh in here. If you want to control which apps are available you will want to removed the App store from the iPads. Think of the Meraki App as your app store and anything you want to have available for the iPads to use is available for download there. Right now at my district we only have a handful of apps that are pushed to every iPad and the biggest one is the Meraki App. I would recommend looking into Apple School Manager also as Meraki can bring in groups/classes from ASM which can be used to push out or make apps available based on classes that students are in. 

Here is an example of how I am utilizing tags at one of the schools in my district.

App list

Please feel free to reach out if you want more information. I have been using ASM and Meraki together since ASM was introduced and helped work out several of the issues in the early days.

[GabBlais]

Wow thanks a lot for this answer, it's pretty much what I needed. I wasn't the one handling the Apple school manager so I'm not sure what I could do with it , but the fact that you can bring classe/group from it might be a huge help for me. I'll try to see how this works, thanks again ! I'll hit you up if I have other questions since you're pretty much in the direction I was heading too

[vassallon]

So after I sync ASM into Meraki. I add on additional tags through a CSV upload with Grad Year, School and Student tags to each student. We also have students log into their iPads through AD during setup to automatically identify who has the iPad and to add auto-tags.

Here is an example of how the users look:

Users

[jared_f]

Apple School Manager is defiantly the root to go here. Meraki has never had a student information system (SIS) importer so syncing with ASM is the best route.

[jared_f]

Are you assigning the iPad to a user in Meraki or using any AD credentials (have them authenticate at enrollment)? While it might be a pain, if you aren't using something like AD I would take the time to enter each students information as a "owner" in Meraki. Then I would tag each user with his/her graduation date (It looks like @vassallon does so) and class membership ~ you can use the same class tags with different users and they would be grouped. I prefer to do everything at the user level because when a user breaks the device, they roll through setup themselves and once they authenticate all user specific content comes down. I have attached a screenshot of this approach. If you aren't using something like AD I would definetly look into Apple School Manager as it syncs with your SIS. Once you sync SIS with Meraki it would take care of what I basically did manually below.

I make any apps that everyone can have available in Meraki MDM and allow users to install from there (use the iOS device tag). Then I get specific based on department (in your case: classes) membership and if someone request an app.

There is a few ways to approach only allowing school approved apps on an iPad. You could disable the App Store, but I prefer to push out a whitelist of the apps I am deploying in Dashboard and allow users to preform app updates in the App Store. 

I hope this helps, I have never ben a fan of over-tagging devices. I prefer the user and policy approach... this is what I have found works best in my opinion, but others here are also very knowledgeable and especially those in K-12 would probably help you better.