Altium Vaults for small teams.

[mrpackethead]

Anybody got any experience with the Altium Vault process, and can make an educated comment based on real experience.

Our team is growing and we have a number of people working on projects.. Is their any value to be had.. The cost of the vault is not trivial.

[DerekG]

The cost of the vault is not trivial.

If you pay the annual maintenance fee, access to the component vault is included. You also then get Altium updates at no further cost.

Making new components in Altium is not difficult & the Altium 10 "frozen library" is freely available to download. Fellow forum member, Free Electron also has a great downloadable library for Altium.

In my opinion, it is not worth paying the annual maintenance fee unless you want to keep up with the latest version. You will get more help on forums like this than from Altium's support staff themselves.

[Christopher]

I thought the purpose of the Vault is to have everyone using the same global part library?

That sounds like a great idea to me.

[DerekG]

I thought the purpose of the Vault is to have everyone using the same global part library?

That sounds like a great idea to me.

If you have a current subscription, you get access to the component vault. You can then pick these components at will & use them in your design.

This works well if you are happy with their footprint. There will be times that you want a modified footprint (ie you a using a relay from China whose footprint is "almost the same" as say a Tyco Electronics (Potter & Brumfield) part.

Tyco cost my company thousands of dollars due to non delivery of an agreed delivery schedule. We therefore refuse to source any parts from Tyco Electronics (we even moved our alarm monitoring away from them after our local company was bought out by Tyco).

[mrpackethead]

you get access to "Altiums" vault, but not your own vault.  Having a private vault costs you a bunch of cash.

[Ice-Tea]

you get access to "Altiums" vault, but not your own vault.  Having a private vault costs you a bunch of cash.

Correct. I think it used tot include a personal vault, but since 2.0, it includes nothing. Not worth it for me. Might just as welk have a central, SVN manager database.

[mausball]

I had a long talk with Altium US about the 'new' vault (2.0) system and how heavily it's biased toward large companies. They agreed it was no longer suitable for small companies or teams like mine (>20 person consulting company). To say I was disappointed is an understatement.