IBM's continuous delivery train keeps rolling, and the last two stops — 3.1.9 on June 25, 2026 and 3.1.10 on July 22, 2026 — bring a mix of quality-of-life reporting upgrades, tighter planning workflow controls, and administrative features that give environment owners more direct control than ever. Let's walk through both releases area by area, so you know exactly what's new and whether it's worth flipping on for your team.
Remember: Planning Analytics Workspace (PAW) updates are cumulative. If you're upgrading straight to 3.1.10, you automatically get everything below from 3.1.9 as well. You can always cross-reference the full fix list history for Planning Analytics Workspace for the underlying defect corrections that ship alongside these features.
3.1.9 — June 25, 2026
Books and Reporting
Three solid additions here, and all three solve real day-to-day friction points.
- Planning Analytics Workspace REST API for content management — You can now manage Workspace content programmatically instead of clicking through the UI. For teams doing bulk moves, automated deployments, or building their own tooling on top of PAW, this opens the door to scripting content operations that used to require manual, one-by-one handling.
- Notification panel — A centralized panel now collects in-product messages generated while you work — saving a book, running a process from an action button, executing a forecast, and similar events. Instead of a toast that flashes and disappears, notifications persist in the panel so you can review them later. This is a small change with a big practical upside for anyone who's ever missed a “process failed” toast because they looked away for two seconds.
- Format attribute rows and columns in cube views — Using the Format manager, you can now apply formatting directly to attribute rows and columns inside cube views, giving report authors finer control over the look of attribute-driven reports without workaround formatting tricks.
Plans and Applications
This is where 3.1.9 puts the most weight, with four updates aimed squarely at making structured planning cycles more flexible.
- Disable submission on data accountability tasks — You can now complete a data accountability task without requiring the user to take ownership or formally submit it. Useful for lighter-weight review steps that don't need the full approval chain.
- Set data scope on tasks in plans — Plan designers can now define the exact data context that applies when a contributor works on a given task, tightening up what a user sees and touches during a specific step in the process.
- Contribution panel improvements — The contribution panel got a visual refresh with clearer button labeling — a usability pass that should reduce the “wait, which button do I click” moments for end users during budget submission season.
- Viewer assignment in workspace plans — You can now assign people as viewers on plan tasks, giving them visibility into progress without pulling them into the contribution or approval workflow. Great for stakeholders (execs, auditors, cross-functional partners) who need to watch a process without owning a piece of it.
Modeling
Two updates, both aimed at the people building and maintaining the underlying TM1 model.
- Import data from remote TM1 servers using Guided Import — Guided Import now supports moving data between cubes across different TM1 servers, including remote ones. That's a meaningful step for organizations running multiple TM1 environments that need to share or consolidate data without building custom TI processes just to move data from server A to server B.
- Split view and Diff view for rules edits — Modelers can now edit different parts of a rules script side by side (split view) and compare unsaved changes against the last saved version (diff view). If you've ever accidentally overwritten a working rule and had no easy way to see what changed, this closes that gap directly in the editor.
Websheets
- Display sum, average, and count of selected cells — Websheets now shows a status bar with the sum, average, and count of whatever cells you've selected — mirroring functionality Excel users have relied on for years. It's a small thing, but for spreadsheet-native finance users, it removes one more reason to second-guess the platform.
Administration
- Memory quotas for Planning Analytics as a Service environments — Environment administrators can now allocate specific memory quotas to individual environments (dev, test, production, etc.), giving much better control over how TM1 database memory gets distributed across an organization's full environment footprint. This is a genuinely useful lever for anyone who's watched one noisy dev environment eat resources that production needed.
- watsonx Orchestrate agentic chat assistant integration — The PA assistant now runs on watsonx Orchestrate with multilingual support and an expanded command set, continuing IBM's push to fold Planning Analytics deeper into its broader AI assistant ecosystem.
- Copy and view activity details in database activities — Admins can now display an Activity ID column and quickly copy session ID, activity ID, or description straight to clipboard. If you've ever had to manually retype an activity ID while troubleshooting a stuck process with IBM support, you'll appreciate this one immediately.
3.1.10 — July 22, 2026
A tighter release, with three areas touched but each update carrying real weight.
Books and Reporting
- Non-administrator file uploads to home directory via Action Button — Using the Action Button's “Allow file upload” option, regular (non-admin) users can now upload files directly to their own home directory. This removes an unnecessary admin dependency for a task that plenty of business users need to do routinely.
- Continue working while PDF bursts run in the background — PDF burst processing is now handled directly by Workspace in the background, so you're not stuck staring at a spinner while a large burst export runs. For finance teams generating dozens or hundreds of individualized PDF reports at month-end, this is a genuine time-back win.
- Apply themes to Workspace books — Book authors can now apply predefined themes to quickly restyle the appearance of books and widgets. If brand consistency across dashboards has ever been a manual, widget-by-widget slog, this gives report authors a much faster path to a polished, consistent look.
Plans and Applications
- Import and export assignments in data accountability tasks — Plan owners can now import and export contributor, approver, and viewer assignments for data accountability tasks rather than assigning them one at a time through the UI — a real time-saver for large, hierarchy-heavy planning structures.
- Associate workflow processes when reverting task or member submissions — You can now tie a workflow process directly to the act of reverting a task or member submission, automating whatever cleanup or notification logic needs to fire when something gets sent back.
- Single member set synchronization in Data Accountability tasks — Selection behavior has changed here: when a contributor, approver, or viewer picks a member from the Data Accountability hierarchy, the visible hierarchy is now limited to just that selected member via single member set synchronization. This is a meaningful security/visibility tightening — worth reviewing with your admin team before rollout, since it changes what users see by default.
Administration
- Automatic resizing of Universal Report header columns — Admins can now configure the AutofitUrHeaderCells Websheet parameter directly from Planning Analytics Administration, rather than needing a separate configuration step outside the UI.
- Configure Planning Analytics data sources — This is arguably the headline feature of 3.1.10. Administrators can now create and manage data source connections directly from Planning Analytics Administration — no more configuring ODBC drivers or deploying the separate ODBC Data Connector. For any organization pulling data from external systems (SQL Server, Oracle, and similar sources), this materially simplifies a setup process that used to require extra infrastructure and admin overhead.
What This Means for Your Team
Looking at these two releases together, a pattern emerges: IBM is spending real engineering effort on the unglamorous stuff that actually determines whether a planning process runs smoothly — background processing so users aren't blocked, cleaner data source configuration so admins don't need extra tooling, tighter member-level visibility controls in data accountability tasks, and notification handling that doesn't rely on catching a toast at the right second.
None of these are the kind of feature that makes a splashy headline. All of them are the kind of feature that saves your team real hours once you actually turn them on.
A few practical notes:
- If you run structured budget or forecast cycles through plans and applications, the single member set synchronization change in 3.1.10 is worth testing in a non-production environment first — it changes default visibility behavior for contributors and approvers.
- If your organization has been waiting on an easier way to connect external data sources, the new data source configuration in Administration (3.1.10) may let you retire a chunk of ODBC-related setup work.
- If your finance team runs large PDF burst reports at month-end, the background burst processing (3.1.10) is worth rolling out immediately — it's pure time-back with no workflow change required.
Further Reading
Want Help Rolling These Out?
Reading a release note is easy. Deciding which of these features are worth turning on, testing them safely in a non-production environment, and rolling them out without disrupting an active budget cycle — that's the hard part, and it's exactly where we spend most of our time with clients. If you want help evaluating what 3.1.9 or 3.1.10 means for your specific Planning Analytics environment, reach out to us at services@lodestarsolutions.com. We'll help you separate the “nice to have” from the “turn this on today.”
