Apptio Planning Release 5.12 

Sandbox: November 24-28, 2025 | Main: December 1-5, 2025 

Plan-Level Access Control

Apptio Planning now supports plan-level access control, enabling administrators to manage user access per plan. This enhancement provides greater flexibility and security by ensuring that visibility and editing rights are defined at the individual plan level.

What's Changing 

1. New Plan-Level User Permissions Page 

Each plan now includes a User Permissions page within Plan Settings. Administrators can grant access to specific Departments directly at the plan level—replacing the previous reliance on global Cost Object Permissions.

The new plan-level User Permissions page also includes search and filtering for easier management. Updates to User Permissions will be recorded in Change History.

2. Global Cost Object Permissions Now Serve as a Template

Global permissions no longer drive access automatically. Instead: 

• New Plan (No Baseline): Global Cost Object Permissions are copied into the plan at creation.
• New Plan (With Baseline): User Permissions from the baseline plan are copied into the new plan. 

Important: 

• Users must now be granted access explicitly at the plan level.
• Global Cost Object Permissions alone will not provide access to plans.
• In a future release, we will add an option to copy permissions from either global Cost Object Permissions or the baseline plan when creating a new plan. 

To bulk apply existing global permissions to a plan, admins can: 

1. Export from Global Cost Object Permissions (Configuration > Cost Object Permissions)
2. Import the CSV into the plan's User Permissions page (Plan > Settings > User Permissions)

An automated syncing option between global Cost Object Permissions and plan-level User Permissions will be delivered in an upcoming release.

Comparison Behavior 

• If a user lacks access to the same Departments in both plans being compared, data for restricted Departments will be obfuscated (eye icon shown).
• For Expenses > Labor sensitive data fields, comparisons will only display values when the user has access to sensitive data in both plans. 

Upgrade Behavior 

• Existing plans will retain their current access.
• During upgrade, plan-level permissions will be automatically populated based on current Cost Object Permission settings. 

For more details, see the Help documentation on Cost Object Permissions. 

Hyperlink Fields 

You can now create custom columns of type Link in Apptio Planning, allowing you to attach URLs-such as Jira tickets, documentation, or external resources-directly to your line items for quick navigation. 

• Add Link-type columns in your Schema configuration.
• Clicking a link opens it in a new browser tab.
• Link fields are fully supported in the New View and appear as read-only in the Legacy View. 

This enhancement helps you keep external references tied to your planning data for easier tracking and faster navigation.

Bug Fixes 

• Fixed an issue where the Contract Extension Start Date in the New View began on the Contract End Date instead of the following day. 

See upcoming and historical releases: What's New (cumulative).

 

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Ngoc Le
Principal Product Manager
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Hi Rebecca! Thanks for reaching out.

When you create a new plan, it'll use the permissions from COP. If you create a plan from a baseline, it'll use the baseline plan's permission. If one need to make changes to permissions, they should do so in Plan Settings > User Permissions for each plan. To summarize, this is the behavior: 

• New Plan (No Baseline): Global Cost Object Permissions are copied into the plan at creation.
• New Plan (With Baseline): User Permissions from the baseline plan are copied into the new plan.
  Hope this helps!

Hi Rebecca,

For now, you'll need to add that user to each plan they require access to. However, in an upcoming January release, we will introduce an option to bulk-update all plans using the global Cost Object Permissions to streamline this experience.

Hi Ngoc, do you know when this will be in January as currently this is a lengthy process. 2 options we have is to export out the user permissions in each plan to add the new user on, this requires a download, add user on and then saving over the download to import, then this takes 2-3 mins to load back in, sits in idle for a bit. Other option is to load in the latest user permission from the latest plan in to each historic plan,  this again take 2-3mins to load, then an error appears if there is cost objects that do not exist in that plan, which you would expect (would take longer if we did a lookup for all existing cost objects in each plan) then to import with issues to ignore this it take another 2-3mins to work though. Its frustrating task that is adding no value. We have 46 plans  new users would be need to be added onto. 

Hi Rebecca - We're rolling out a fix for this tomorrow. For more information, refer to: https://community.ibm.com/community/user/discussion/apptio-planning-whats-new-release-5132-december-24-2025