Altium Vault 2.6 brings some organizational reshuffling of the vault's browser-based interface. Pages that are only ever accessible by a Vault Administrator are now tidily presented on a dedicated ADMIN menu. In addition, and part of this admin-only area, a new page is available - Settings. This page provides a collection of sub-pages relating to configuration for areas such as Network Installations, Licensing, and Email Notifications, as well as the configuration of aspects relating to the vault itself, starting with Part Requests.

Dedicated Admin Menu

When signed-in to your Altium Vault as an Administrator for that vault, the dedicated ADMIN menu will be available at the top-right of the interface. The menu gives access to the following admin-only areas:

• VCS - providing the interface to the local Version Control Service, to define SVN-based Design Repositories for use by all designers across the organization. These repositories provide the source-side storage for Managed Projects.
• Suppliers - facilitating centralized supply chain management, with designers across the entire organization using the same approved list of Vendors with which to source supply chain intelligence for the components used in their designs.
• Installations - providing the interface to the Network Installation Service, through which you can perform installations or updates to Altium Designer over your local network, through hand-crafted deployment packages.
• Configurations - providing the interface to the Team Configuration Center, to define and manage Environment Configurations. These are used to constrain each designer's Altium Designer working environment to only use company-ratified design elements, including schematic templates, output job configuration files, and workspace preferences. In other words, it facilitates Centralized Environment Configuration Management.
• Status - providing a page with: Version information for the current Altium Vault installation; Information about the installation paths for the database and data, including the type of database being used by the Altium Vault; and information about the installation path to log files, with the ability to download a zip containing the relevant set of log files for each.
• Settings - providing a collection of sub-pages relating to general configuration for areas such as Network Installations, Licensing, and Email Notifications, as well as the configuration of aspects relating to the vault itself, including Part Requests.
• Licenses - providing the interface to view and assign vault licensing (including assignment across specific roles), and to obtain reports on real-time license usage, as well as usage history and usage log.

Access to administrator-only areas of the vault's browser interface is now provided through a dedicated, and convenient, menu.

Settings Page

From the ADMIN menu, choose Settings to access a new area of vault-related settings.

Accessing the Settings area - part of the admin-only pages within the vault's browser-based interface.

The left-hand side provides a navigation tree with which to quickly access various sub-pages of settings. The following pages are available:

• General - when using the Network Installation Service (NIS), use this page to enter the credentials used to log into the Altium Cloud (AltiumLive) where the installers are to be sourced from. When using the Private License Service through the vault, these credentials allow the Private License Service (PLS) to communicate directly with your Altium Live account for the initial acquisition of your company licenses.
  • Session Lifetime - use this page to enter a value for the IDS Session Lifetime (in hours). This is how long a vault user has to remain connected, in a single session, when using a seat of the applicable Vault Client Access License (CAL). By default, the session lifetime is 24 hours.
• License Manager - this page provides settings relating to licensing for the Private License Service. Pre-set suitable default values are used for the Altium Cloud portal URL and PLS URL/Port. You also set here the security mode for the PLS (Password protected, or Username only).
• Network Installation - when using the Network Installation Service (NIS), use this page to define the update checking interval. This is the frequency (in minutes) that the Automatic Updates feature will check for available new versions of the applicable software in the Cloud.
• Email Notifications - this page provides settings to enable and configure the vault's email notifications feature. This facility flags a variety of events to key stakeholders, relating to Component Items, Managed Projects, Approval Requests, and Part Requests.

The Vault area of the tree is for gathering together settings related to specific functionality within the vault itself, Currently, only one feature aspect is listed - Part Requests, with the following sub-pages of settings:

• Librarians Role - use this page to specify which role (or roles) should be used to fulfill the role of Librarians for your organization. In essence, you are simply configuring a set of users of your Altium Vault, that can be assigned to a part request.
• Custom States - use this page to customize opened and closed states for the Part Request feature.