Design Collaboration / How to Control Access and Share Your Projects Completed

Design Collaboration

How to Control Access and Share Your Projects

Altium 365 allows granular control of who can access your projects and what actions they can perform with them. Here, we are going to show you how you can manage those granular sharing options:

Different ways to share your project
How to check and control who has access to your project
Advanced sharing settings

Altium 365 supports three primary methods of giving other users access to a PCB project:

Add users to your Altium 365 workspace – the best option for sharing projects with your team members and others you collaborate with regularly.
Share an individual project with someone outside of the workspace – this method works well for one-off cases when you need to collaborate on a limited number of projects but make sure collaborators don’t gain access to anything else in your workspace.
Share a static snapshot of the project – this works well when you need to provide view-only access to a project or create a public link to share with someone without an Altium account. Please note that you cannot revoke access to a shared snapshot.

1. Add users to your Altium 365 Workspace

An Altium 365 Workspace is a secure cloud environment where you and your team can store all of your design projects.

Important! By default, when you invite someone to your workspace, you give them access to your current and future projects. These default settings can be adjusted.

With the Standard subscription plan, you can control access on the level of each project or item. For more details on item- vs. folder-level sharing, check out this article on sharing folders and items.

The Pro plan allows control at the folder level and by user role. Read about managing membership of your Altium 365 Workspace for more details.

Administrators always have access to everything in the workspace.

Fig. 1 - Altium 365 Workspace administrator and members — **Fig. 1** - Altium 365 Workspace administrator and members

Tip: If you are not sure what subscription plan your organization has, log in to your workspace via web browser and look at the workspace name in the menu on the right. If you have the Pro plan, you will see the label next to the name of the workspace.

Fig. 2 - Altium 365 Pro plan — **Fig. 2** - Altium 365 Pro plan

2. Share an individual project with someone outside of the workspace

You can share only one or two projects with someone without adding them to your workspace. They will have no access to anything else in the workspace.

Fig. 3 - User outside Altium 365 Workspace — **Fig. 3** - User outside Altium 365 Workspace

You can share a project with a user from within your company or even someone outside of your organization. If they don’t have an Altium Live account, they will be prompted to sign up for one to access the project you shared.

To share outside of your workspace:

Open the project either in Altium Designer or in your web browser.

Click the Share button.

Fig. 4 - Share button in Altium Designer — **Fig. 4** - Share button in Altium Designer

Fig. 5 - Share button in the web browser — **Fig. 5** - Share button in the web browser

In the Share dialog, type the email address of the person you are sharing the project with.

Fig. 6 - “Share Project With” dialog — **Fig. 6** - “Share Project With” dialog

You will see a warning that you are sharing outside of your workspace. Click Ok.

Fig. 12 - “Share outside the workspace” — **Fig. 7** - “Share outside the workspace”

3. Share a static snapshot of the project

You can also share a snapshot of a project on the web. A design snapshot shared in this way is essentially a read-only, static copy of the project. Updates to the project will not be reflected in the snapshot.

Fig. 13 - Public URL of the snapshot — **Fig. 8** - Public URL of the snapshot

Important! Once you share the snapshot, you cannot revoke access to it. Even if you delete the project from your workspace, the 48-hour link will work until its expiration time, and the users you shared the snapshot with will have access to the static copy.

There are two ways to share a snapshot:

3.1. Generate a temporary link that will allow anyone with the link access to the snapshot for 48 hours.

Click Snapshot on the Web in the Share dialog box.

Fig. 14 - Sharing the snapshot — **Fig. 9** - Sharing the snapshot

Click the Generate Link button.

Tip: After generation, the link will work for 48 hours.

3.2. Share with specific people

To give permanent access to a snapshot and provide the ability to comment on the specific project, toggle Share with specific people on.

Fig. 16 - “Share with specific people” — **Fig. 11** - “Share with specific people”

Enter the email addresses of the users you want to invite. You can also add a note to the invitation that all invited users will receive.

Click Advanced Settings to choose whether to allow collaborators to reshare or download the project:

Fig. 17 - Advanced settings — **Fig. 12** - Advanced settings

After entering all data, click Send to send the invitation.

Fig. 18 - Message successfully sent — **Fig. 13** - Message successfully sent

The recipient will receive an e-mail containing a link to the workspace.

Fig. 14 - Invitation received by the user — **Fig. 14** - Invitation received by the user

Tip: You can view all the snapshots you have shared by clicking the Altium 365 – My Personal Space link in the Share dialog box after sharing the project. You can also access this information by clicking Shared with Me in Altium 365 Workspace.

How to check and adjust who has access to your project

While there are several methods of sharing a project, whichever one you use, you can always check who a project has been shared with. To check and adjust who has access to a specific project, follow these steps:

Open your workspace in the web browser.

Select a project and click

on the project thumbnail or click Share in the upper-right corner.

Fig. 15 - Share command in the menu and Share button in the upper-right corner of the Altium 365 window — **Fig. 15** - Share command in the menu and Share button in the upper-right corner of the Altium 365 window

Click Shared With in the Share dialog to see who has access. Here, you can also type the email address or role of the user you would like to share a project with in the “Share Project With” field.

Shared with Me

On the left-hand side of the screen, you will see “Shared with me”. Those are all the projects that others have shared with you.

In the "Shared with Me," all the snapshots and projects shared with you are visible here. You can open in Altium 365, download, share (have permissions to share this project) or delete them from your Altium 365.

Accessing Shared Snapshots

Snapshots are packages (zip archives) that contain the project files. The project is packaged into a Zip archive using Altium Designer's Project Packager, then uploaded to the Altium 365 platform. Recipients will have access to view the design snapshot through the Shared with Me page of the Altium 365 Platform Interface – in practice, through the Shared with Me page of their Personal Space or a Workspace they have access to.

Tip: The user who originally shared the design snapshot – uploading it permanently to the Altium 365 platform – will be able to access that snapshot from the Files page of their Personal Space.

On the profile menu, you will find “My Personal Space”. All the snapshots and file that you shared are available there.

A data snapshot can be downloaded from the Files page of your Personal Space. Selecting its tile will present various controls and commands. Click the control and choose the Download command, or click the button (at the top-right of the page) to download the snapshot as a Zip archive.

Fig. 16 - Share With in the Share dialog — **Fig. 16** - *Share With* in the Share dialog

Advanced sharing settings

In addition to controlling who can view and edit a project, it is important to check who can reshare it with others and download source files. To do so, click Advanced Settings in the Share dialog.

In the Advanced Settings dialog, make corresponding changes. Note that Editors are users who were given the Can Edit permission level and Viewers are users with the Can View permission level.

Fig. 23 - Permission levels — **Fig. 18** - Permission levels

Good job! Article is now completed!

Mark as Completed Completed

article Previous

article Next

Was this article useful?
Yes No

Thank you Glad to hear it