Catching up on the CIPP Release Notes: v8.5.0-v10.10.0

Speaker: So, CIPP has had some updates. I mean, come on. We've been busy. I mean, I've moved house. It's been a lot going on. Okay. I mean, let's just get to it.

Speaker: Okay. So, the first release we're going to look at since the last time obviously I had a video out is the Australian 57. So this was back in October 2025. So it's been a while, but you know, we're there now. This release is more or less just checking on my notes. So if I'm looking over here, it's why I've gone through and tried to get some decent notes as to each release so that, you know, I'm not just reading out what it is for you. But effectively, what this one's talking about is a lot of variables.

Um, the big one that obviously I've come to love over time now using it is autocomplete of tenant variables or variables in CIPP as it is. There's obviously other talk about the check extension if you guys aren't already using that. It's been a while now. You should be, as well as you know deploying it to your customers and things. But it is very, very good. This release is pretty simple. The other thing is obviously improving of the screens that you're seeing. So a lot more work is going into improving the UX and keeping things within one UI rather than, you know, the CIPP days of clicking in something and then also finding it over here and all that. This should help us a lot there.

Cool. So, the next release we're looking at is 8.60. This was also October, so a little bit later, October 2025. What this added was dynamic tenant groups, which is very good. I've been using that a lot myself over time. Adding different tenants you want into a single group that allows you to select that group in standards or, you know, different places within the UI, allowing you to dynamically pick a group rather than having to select each tenant every time. So, that's a really good one as well.

Uh, release notes in app is a cool one as well that's been added. So, that's quite helpful. I probably will end up using that going forward, with future releases, but for now I'm set up on GitHub. That's all we need to look at for now. A lot of fixes in this release as well, which is very handy. We had MX record alert added, group visibility, file key retrieval, duplicate app detection. There's a bunch of cool stuff in here.

Okay, so the next one is 8.70 Cocktail of the Week from November of 2025. So, we're slowly getting to current day. Uh, this release added some improvements to conditional access, vacation mode, vacation schedulers is what I now call it. Um, specifically around exclusion groups instead of directly modifying the policies themselves where creating groups that we add the users to which then get added to the policy as the exclusion. So everyone within that group is excluded from that policy. So a bit more of a consistent way to do it. Those groups will stay in the tenant and can be used in future without having to mess about with adding and removing people directly from the policy and inevitably causing problems with that.

Better enterprise app deployment experience is good. If you haven't played with this yet, it's worth having a look. It makes it a lot simpler. Dynamic tenant groups from the last release got expanded again. So you can use variables within them to sort the tenants specifically as well as secure score improvements as well. So that is helpful. You can bulk set things to resolve by third party which is good.

So the next release after that is 8.80, the Swamp Water, which is December of 2025. So nearly in 2026. This one was very much about speed and power as the name suggests. What happened here was a backend sort of legacy code cleanup where standards deployment tracking was improved, as well as lowering the cost for self-hosted instances. So besides the speed improvements, there was some changes to backup retention policies. So you can customise this or extend the backup retention policies in the CIPP settings.

There were some changes to standards and Intune. So the way that you deploy them drastically improved, as well as Intune passcodes and some JIT improvements that you got listed there. That's pretty much all that's on my notes for this one.

So jumping into the next one is version 10 CIPP X. So yeah, they did a Microsoft, they did an Apple, they did a whatever. They skipped the version. Don't like nine. It's unlucky. We've gone straight to 10. So this one's the Xanadu. I think that's how you say it. I'm probably outing myself. So the new dashboard stuff we added in secure scores, MFA status, a bunch of different stuff on the dashboard. Basically, it's the thing you'll see when you first sign into CIPP these days. It's been improved again, but that'll be in a further release. We'll see some more info on that. But effectively, it's a big pretty dashboard that you see when you first sign in with all the key information that you want to see, as well as the improvement of testing that you can do, drifting with better UX.

Again, drift and standards themselves were improved so that you've got a bit more UX cleanliness. You can see specific policy deviations, things like that in a much more clean UI. It's a lot easier to work with. Additional reports were added as well. Um, and again, some further JIT improvements. There's a lot of things in this release, so it could be that you want to click around or using the built-in release notes on the app itself, check back through if there's anything that relates to you. But obviously this was quite a while ago now. So most of those things you've probably learned to love.

Jumping on to the next one, we've got the Bulldog Smash 10.1, February 2026. So, thankfully in 2026 now. This one is another quite large release. There was custom Intune applications added. So, you can do this, you know, via PowerShell or something using custom scripts to do custom things for you. It's quite a complex thing. So I'll let you touch on that yourself, but it is obviously an option now.

BPA was deprecated in favour of the test that I spoke about from the last release. So you can use tests now going forward. BPA is no longer should be used, and obviously I think is even getting removed in maybe one of the most recent releases. So it's not really an option to use anymore. VAPP and direct tenant onboarding improvements across the board. There's some more stuff on that since, so I'm not going to bother touching base on that very much.

Graph Explorer, obviously updated, added a bunch more reports, made it prettier, very helpful. As well as a universal search, which is the box bar, whatever you want to call it, where you can type in something and it will find it within the app for you. Really helpful. Um, I think that's even keybinded. You can, I think, Ctrl K or something like that on Windows to use the search, and very helpful in that regard.

There was uh something in here about offboarding wizards not refreshing correctly. So that being fixed was quite a big thing for me at the time. Um, obviously since probably doesn't matter as much but worth mentioning.

On to the next one. So 10.2.0, Blue Monday, uh, March of 2026. Everyone hates Monday. Yeah. I guess this release added obviously vacation mode 2.0, kind of an additional improvement on the vacation mode, vacation schedule options that you have. You can now do temporary mailbox permissions, temporary out of office, improvements to the whole process basically.

So, as well as conditional access, which like I said has changed to using exclusion groups. You can now do all this additional stuff which is effectively the overarching vacation for this user can be configured rather than having to do a conditional access exclusion and then, you know, setting their out of office separately and all that. You can do it all in one UI, one flow, which is very good.

BitLocker key search. So universal search also now has BitLocker from the last release. So that's good. There will, I'm sure, there'll be many, many, many things added to universal search over time, but this is just another one. Um, as well as bookmarks. So bookmarks, very helpful. You've got a whole bunch of things down the side of the screen, and I can show you that in a minute, but it saves you a lot of time if you use your bookmarks accurately.

Um, one of these releases soon, maybe one of the next ones, adds breadcrumbs as well, which just makes using the UI so much easier. Um, I'm sure anyone that's actively in there will love it. So, keyboard shortcut, one of the ones I mentioned, Ctrl K, I thought was universal search. It could be tenant selector or I could have it mixed up. I think it is universal search, but Ctrl Alt K is obviously the tenant selector, which is quite handy if you're a Vim user, you're a keyboard fiend, that's going to be amazing for you.

Um, skipping through Blue Monday, we've got 10.3.0, the Fishbowl, which is from April. So we're getting closer and closer now. This is again rather big one. There's a lot of custom reporting, custom tests, everything like that is getting increasingly improved on iteration after iteration, as well as again vacation mode. So this one is scheduling groups and forwarding, as well as a tutorial that's got added. Uh, they tend to use the Storylane demos a lot more these days. So, if you're interested, you can click on one of those. Otherwise, I'm sure at some point in the next ten years, I will make a video about vacation mode.

On top of that, webhooks got improved. This was a big thing for me at the time. Uh, a universal schema. So you know what you're going to get from CIPP these days basically from a webhook rather than it being as random as it was. Next thing I'm looking for is webhooks per setting or you know per standard or more options in terms of the webhooks themselves. Currently you can only do it to one webhook URL that's configured in the CIPP notifications. I want to expand on that if possible but we'll see. We'll see what happens with that.

Time zones uh were improved as well which is good to see. Adding the user I think this has been changed again since so I won't dive into it too much but this is where the Fishbowl name comes in. All of these additional things that were added, more custom scripts like we said, more templates, comparisons, create template from user, user templates is then a thing that you can do as well. So, a bunch of different settings that are saved to CIPP directly that become an option when you're creating a new user going forward. It's uh very, very big.

Cool. So, next we've got 10.4.0, the Jamaican 10-speed. Uh, this was a big push for CIPP speed effectively. Um, similar to the one before, Swamp Water, where they looked at power and speed, they've gone back to it and decided that CIPP wasn't quite quick enough and tried to improve on that. Outside of the speed settings that they've done, they've also added uh applied standards report which is across all tenants and gives you an easy overview to see which client is compliant and which is not.

Again, really helpful, similar to like a dashboard thing where you can see everything like a secure score list or something like that. This is giving you a list of all the standards that are applied and how they're doing effectively. You see some more check monitoring stuff and secure score drops effectively, whether secure score has dropped, i.e. a setting was changed or, you know, something was added and therefore the percentage goes down. That's the sort of thing you want to be looking out for.

As well as again another bunch of, you know, standards that were added, different views for tenant alignment, the options for deviations, permanent deviation, drifts, bunch of different things that become helpful across time.

Moving on to 10.5.0 from June. The Jungle Juice. This one is very AI. It's got a bit of everything. Like it says, it's uh added the CIPP MCP. That's where the AI comes from. I realised as I said that that could have pandered people's noses up. Uh, CIPP itself is not AI. It's just added the ability to use AI with it. It is quite handy if you want to use it, but obviously take everything with a pinch of salt. Don't, you know, connect AI and expect it to make the world for you. It's obviously read-only as it is. We're not expecting it to go and make changes or apply a licence for someone or anything like that.

There's a hint here about ConnectWise, Autotask or Kaseya integration page has some little hints at potential future integrations. Yeah. So, I'll save you the trouble. Uh, this is being built via a third party. I don't think it's in CIPP as of yet. They're still being worked on, and they're being worked on via Roost, um, who are building crates effectively. So if you don't use Roost, this won't affect you. If you are expecting it now, it's not there. So it is something to keep an eye out for if you are a user of one of these platforms.

Um, otherwise, you know, move to Halo. I build on that integration and that's obviously what we use at Renada. So you probably are a user of that if you're watching this video anyway. Some additional changes obviously to Purview, there a bunch of add-ons. Um, I don't think it existed before, before now in CIPP, so they added a lot of Purview DLP retention, sensitivity labelling, all that sort of stuff directly in CIPP, so you can manage and, you know, deploy to your clients a lot more efficiently.

Application deployment as a standard is a thing you can do now. This is really, really helpful, especially if you're creating something like an uninstall. You can deploy that as a custom policy, set it to remediate, and it will go ahead and do that for you.

SharePoint retention was a big one. Obviously, biggest complaints by MSPs have uh SharePoint retention, as well as, you know, managing SharePoint sites, permissions, that sort of thing is something that comes a little bit later. So, sneak peek there. As well as tenant tests compliance. This stuff is on the dashboard now as far as I remember. And some additional testing and a whole bunch of other standards that were added, gizmos and, you know, a lot of other different options. So, OneDrive sharing, disabling, so more nav expansion, a bunch of different things.

Moving into 10.6.0, this is the Hydration Break. So this was during the World Cup, um, July of 2026. Oh, how I miss it. This release, as big as the World Cup is, probably lives up to it. There is uh new permissions added. So, if you haven't done it already, this is an action for you after watching this video. Go to your CIPP, go to application settings, permissions, and refresh your CPV. Double check it doesn't have any permissions that need to be added to the app.

You can click, I think it's just configure or approve or whatever, and it will go and do that for you. But make sure to check this. You should do this as often as possible. Here's an action for you. Now go do it. Co-pilot and shadow AI detection. So kind of part of my tangent a minute ago. AI is not always the best thing. It's not always there to help you. Sometimes it can be malicious in terms of its usage or who's using it or what they're using, where they're sending your data, that sort of thing. So this adds a way for you to detect that um and keep an eye on it within CIPP effectively.

And here is some of the SharePoint stuff I was mentioning or hinting at a second ago. Uh, this is five different SharePoint feature requests that came in were actioned and it gives you a bunch more options. So you can add members, remove members, you know, revoke sharing links, edit sites, add site admins, delete sites, whole bunch of different things within SharePoint stuff themselves, as well as undeleting, accidentally deleted files. You can do that as well. So, it's adding a bunch of different things, as well as the sharing report as well. Very big one here.

And we get to the fun stuff. So, there's a part of this release here where I was tagged directly because I went in and updated Halo. So, you had the ability to link tickets directly to the direct user rather than the general user. So effectively, if you turn that setting on, if an MFA ticket is about James Logan Howlet, it'll be assigned to him, not the generic or general user. The way that works is effectively if they're synced in via the CSP integration in Halo, they will then map to the joiner.

If that doesn't exist, we try to match to UPN. And again, if that doesn't exist, it will default back to the general user. So should be helpful. Um, but obviously if it's not something you want to use, you don't have to turn it on. And if there's not a match in your system because of whatever reason, it will go back to the general user anyway.

And as you can see, I'm running out of breath. These are getting quite long. Uh, dashboard got some more updates. BCDR had a facelift, um, configure or methods, a bunch of different things, as well as a whole list of them again. And so I think this goes over some things again like deleting sites, external users. There's a whole bunch of different things. If you care about it, you can pause it, give it a read, or go see the release yourself.

Moving into 10.7.0, the Frisky Whiskey. Excited, excited, excited. If you haven't seen it already, go and watch Project Hail Mary. I suppose it's not in the cinemas anymore, but it's a great film. I'm sure you can get it on disc or DVD.

Okay, so this release is probably the biggest one's ever done. The reason being is not necessarily because of features or, you know, anything like that. It is more about the underlying way that CIPP works. So in this release, CIPP moved from Azure Static Web Apps to Azure Web Apps, which is effectively a Docker backend. Um, if you are a hosted customer, you would have already been migrated and already know and have noticed all of the speed improvements um that this entails. But effectively what it means is CIPP is going to be a whole shed load faster.

So in testing, day-to-day usage is 100 to 150% faster, and the caching mechanics they're seeing a 300% faster reload of pages, which is very, very good. Um, if you've used CIPP for a while, you'll obviously know that it can be slow at times. This is incredibly good for that.

Improvements on that. Hosted instances have even bigger performance with 1000% improvements thanks to the scale of deployed instances which is good. If you're a non-hosted or self-hosted customer, obviously you will need to manually migrate that. There has been in the last release a migration script released. So you won't actually have to do any of that manual stuff unless you've already done it. You'll be able to do that script. So we'll touch on that when we get to that release in a second.

So like I said, past that actual features in this more SharePoint stuff. Thankfully SharePoint templates, um creating complex site environments with libraries takes a lot of time. So now we can do that in CIPP. You can create a library, you can create templates, you can edit that template, deploy that template across the board to everyone, set it up however you want it to be. Very big release, huge. Like I said, probably one of the biggest or best in my opinion that CIPP have ever done. Outside of the ones that obviously I'm a part of, those are the best ones.

But again, outside of those features, the big big ones, you've got some more little things that are added, creating groups and setting in standards, just a bunch of standard additions and cool things that matter. Moving past that, we'll jump past all the hotfixes and go to the next big release, which is 10.8.7. This was August of 2026, Ramos Melon Fizz. I have no idea what that one is. Obviously it's a cocktail, but that is their probably the craziest name I've heard of. Obviously opinion based. I'm curious what other people think is the craziest cocktail release name they've heard of.

So this release again is another rather big one but the first thing you'll see is obviously mention about the migration of new infrastructure from the previous release. Again talking about speed increases but some specific changes you need to be aware of. So by default your website's domain will stop working. It migrates to a new one that the Azure web apps uses. So it will cease to exist. You've probably already encountered this at this point, but if you've had that happen or your CIPP stopped working and you need to figure out what to do, you can sign into the management app and find your URL in there. If you're using a custom domain, nothing changes, but you'll notice the domain is forwarding. So you'll want to change your CNAME to the new URL. Which again, you can see in the management app. You would have had to have done this initially when you set up CIPP. So effectively, you're just following the same thing again. There's a wizard you can go through that. It's pretty easy.

If you have not yet migrated to SSO, users will get a popup consent in the new app, but you can reconsent this by performing the SSO migration when it pops up for you. So all of those things you should do. If you got any questions, you can ask in Discord or the help desk and they'll help you. But it's pretty straightforward. If you are using CIPP actively, you've probably already done this. Either way, worth noting.

Terms of things that are new in this version, tenant selector was updated, so you can add favourites now. When you've got a tenant selected, it sort of stays at the top. It's a general better feel like it says there. John also improved some of the dashboards, so you can get all tenants overview dashboard. You get testing suite, secure score, and more. Dashboards are drastically improved again, which is good. The other big thing is the branding and reporting. The guy spent a lot of time adding and improving this. So now you can add your own custom branding. You can add your own cover images, a lot of different settings in this. Again, I think this has been touched on since, but it's a drastic improvement that allows you to customise things a lot more. So your customers when you're giving them a report don't necessarily know where it's come from. I guess you can customise it to the point that it's something white labelled that you've created yourself.

On top of this is a notice about using the MCP with the new infrastructure. It's been updated so you don't have to use client ID and password. It's user based or which does auto discovery. So that's a good thing as well. You can configure the MCP app. Obviously this applies to only one API integration per instance. But you can change it from client ID and password. Now effectively like I hinted earlier, BPA is leaving, though in October it'll be completely removed. So that's in a few weeks time you can no longer enable it with a feature flag. So it's going to be gone. That's why the tests exist. Classic dashboard is leaving the same date. That's fine because the new dashboards have been tenfold improvement. So you won't have any issues.

Some other things that were important, setup wizard gates the app until SAM is configured which is good. Some people will get confused with that. There are a bunch of different improvements to standards. I'm zone auto derived. There's some API improvements on the back end. A bunch of cool things if you care about them.

Moving forward again, we've got the adult Capri Sun. This is from last month, so we're getting very close now. 10.9.0. Again, we're talking about migration for hosted clients. It's gone well effectively over the last two weeks. They were migrated. People have been enjoying the summer and that's why it's called the adult Capri Sun. So the mobile view is the sort of big feature in this release that was improved. John and Kevin working on this I think side by side. I know John did a lot of work on it. It looks like Kevin was as well. Effectively making it more friendly on a mobile phone.

So I think this is a web app that effectively you can save on your desktop on your phone as like an app itself. So you can open it directly into CIPP. It hides the search bar and all the stuff that takes up all the screen real estate. So you can use CIPP as if it was a custom app built for a phone. As it says, CIPPing on the road became a whole lot easier.

Outside of that, RBAC was improved. So ability to impersonate a role to see the setup and different things that you can work on is quite helpful if you're one of those people that want to specify different types of permissions and roles that people should use within CIPP, which is always good to do. Quarantine management is a thing that was massively improved. You get full mass message details and parsing let you see what's inside it before you release it. So a good way to confirm the contents aren't malicious before you're sending them out to a user. Same note on the MCP, that is fine. So we can skip over that.

And again the deprecation notices. Some more things here. I think the big ones are app lifetime and lease length configuration as a standard is a big one I noticed. As well as like Partner Center API token check for GDAP and some more info on that to make things a bit better but the main one is obviously the mobile UI. Cool. So into the next one is 10.10.

Forget me not, which is the most recent release. So thankfully we are finally here. Migration for self-hosted clients is now available. So if you're still self-hosting, you're not migrated, you're still on the old version, you're complaining about how slow CIPP is, go ahead and do that. There's a link to the migration script directly within the release notes. So you can jump in, check that out, and get migrated, get that big large improvement that everybody else has that you've left for so long.

Outside of that, message traces rebuilt on graph. Again, John has gone in and had a look at that and made some massive improvements to the performance. There's some updates to JIT RO templates as well as Privilege Identity Management. All without requiring a P1, P2 licence. So nice helpful one there. As well as a bunch of quality of life improvements where again I've been tagged, just saying.

So the front end was updated to Material UI 9, which means some of the things might not look exactly the same as before. Spacing is a bit better. Things are generally more crisp. Like I said, I've added a bunch of contributions for the Halo integration, which now allows you to set per ticket priorities. So effectively when you configure an alert in CIPP, you can choose the priority you want that alert to generate the ticket in Halo. So allows you to choose, say, like a breach or a potential user compromise gets logged as a critical alert. And a notification about someone's SharePoint space being at 50% usage gets logged as a low priority effectively. So a bit more customisation there and the integration between Halo and CIPP gets a bit of love there.

GDAP menu got a lot of love, simplifying the pages and the complexity of the workflow. So this is a thing that I've seen where when you're actually doing GDAP setup or the SAM wizard, the workflow itself has been slightly improved and changed. So that is quite good. The SAM one is obviously not mentioned here, but must have happened earlier. It's something I've definitely noticed since the releases. Again, we've got deprecation notices and a bunch more other things. So there we are. Obviously there was a lot to talk about. It's going to be a rather long video. What are we at? We're at 40 something minutes now. So Dylan's got a bit of work cutting it down.

If you got any questions, obviously you chuck them in the comments. Anything important, urgent you want to let me know about, you can shoot me a message on Discord or email me or whatever you want to do. I have been looking at other improvements for the Halo integration. So if anyone's got any ideas, let me know. But until next time, hopefully this time or the next release rather than 15 of them in one go. I will catch you later. Cheers.