To improve your Altium 365 experience and provide a more collaborative design review, we released the comments on the BOM, where you can leave comments, tag people, and create tasks. Also, with the click of a button, you can compare two BOM versions and see what changed between them. Altium 365 now allows users to mark specific points in a project’s history by using tags as a great way to call out significant versions visually. We implemented actionable VCS and soft-lock status icons and notifications if you have duplicate project files in the repository.
We proudly announce the winners of our first Altium 365 PCB Design Review Competition! We received nearly 500 entries from all corners of the globe, greatly exceeding our expectations, and due to the success, we are planning the next round! Stay tuned!
Commenting on a Bill of Materials (BOM) in Altium 365
Commenting on a BOM allows users to communicate about changes or unexpected issues to reduce discrepancies and time spent on design changes.
Finding differences between the two versions of BOM is one more way to reduce problems with BOM and inventory management. BOM Compare is a native feature of Altium 365 and does not require external resources or plug-ins. The intuitive UI lets you quickly compare BOMs between commits or releases.
Altium 365 allows users to tag specific points in a project’s history. Tags help navigate the project history and identify meaningful versions (such as design stage, review, and revision), see changes made in that version, open it for viewing, and share the link with others. This feature is helpful when, for example, reviewing specific design versions.
Actionable Version Control System (VCS) Status in Altium Designer
We have implemented actionable VCS status icons in Altium Designer, providing clickable icons that can trigger an action (for example, update to the latest or show file history). This makes VCS-specific actions easier to use, reducing the time required to perform them.
Actionable Soft-Lock Status in Altium Designer
When multiple users edit the same 'soft-locked' document that is part of a Workspace project, an associated conflict status icon appears in the Projects panel. Now, these conflict status icons are actionable. You can click the icon to resolve the conflict by reverting your edits.
Duplicate project files in the repository
If duplicate PrjPcb files are found in the project repository for the same project, it can cause design files to be displayed incorrectly in a web browser. Altium 365 now detects cases like this and provides a warning.
PCB Design Review Challenge Winners
Altium 365 PCB Design Review Competition was a success! We had so many participants submitted correct answers, but only 10 lucky entrants were selected by a random drawing to win a $500 gift card each. All the prizewinners are listed here: Design Review Competition Winners. Thank you all for embracing this challenge. We are already preparing the next one!
That is all we had to share with you this time. Make sure to check out our Altium 365 tutorial and come say “hi” at one of the live training sessions we host several times a month