Sponsor Quick Start

Welcome to your hosted instance of CIPP!

If you need assistance with or aren't comfortable navigating these requirements alone, take a look at our Professional Onboarding Services page, which offers a paid option for those who need a bit more hands on guidance with GDAP & CIPP deployment.

If you've started the sponsorship process and are ready to enhance your management of Microsoft 365 tenants with efficiency, this guide is designed to get you started. You can click through the flipbook experience starting with Prerequisites or follow below.

Initial Sponsorship Actions

1. Subscription Activation: Start by signing up for the $99 subscription using your GitHub account on the GitHub Sponsorship page.

2. Welcome Email: Upon subscription, you will receive an email with detailed instructions to kickstart your deployment. This email will guide you to the CIPP management portal for deployment steps.

Deployment & Service Account Creation

1. Configure CIPP Deployment: Log in to your management portal using the GitHub credentials you used to initiate the sponsorship. This is where you can kick off your deployment, add custom domain names, and begin inviting users into CIPP. See Installation for a walkthrough of this process. NOTE: If you sponsor with an organisation GitHub account, please send in a message to [e-mail] with your personal GitHub username so that we can manually add that user to the portal. You cannot log in to the management portal with organisation accounts.

2. Service Account Creation: Follow the instructions carefully on the Creating the CIPP Service Account page to ensure there are no permission issues when connecting your tenants within CIPP in the subsequent steps.

Accessing CIPP & Executing Setup Wizard

1. Add Yourself to CIPP: You'll complete the initial setup of Single Sign On and add your first user from the first time setup form when you open up your new instance. Get the URL from the management portal or in the email you receive when installation is complete. Further guidance can be found on the Setting Up SSO and Getting Access to CIPP page.

2. Execute Setup Wizard: Follow the instructions on the Executing the Setup Wizard page once logged into your CIPP instance using your newly invited account, NOT the service account. The service account is only used during specific configuration steps within the Setup Wizard.

Managing Client Relationships

1. Onboard Existing Relationships: If your GDAP relationships with clients are already configured and you do not need to create new invites, proceed to Recommended First Steps to start managing your clients immediately.

2. Establish New Relationships: If you need to establish new GDAP relationships for new clients, use the Tenant Onboarding wizard to generate invites and complete the necessary actions to onboard the client to CIPP.

If you are unsure about whether your clients' environments are GDAP ready, or need more information about the process, continue to the Tenant Onboarding page for more granular details & next steps.

Sponsorship Billing

Sponsorship is billed by GitHub, not by CyberDrain, and GitHub Sponsors has no billing cycle of its own. A sponsorship always takes the billing date, payment method and receipt already set on the GitHub account that starts it. If that account's paid plan is billed annually, the sponsorship is billed annually on the same renewal date, and it appears on the same receipt as your other GitHub charges. If the account is billed monthly, the sponsorship is billed monthly.

This catches people out when a sponsorship started from an account on annual billing produces a single yearly charge rather than the monthly one they expected. Check your account's billing date and payment method at github.com/settings/billing before you subscribe, and change the account's billing frequency first if you want the sponsorship charged differently.

Changing a sponsorship amount later applies from the next renewal rather than adjusting the period already paid for.