Authoring Access in Altium Designer Develop

Accessing authoring abilities in Altium Designer Develop is required in order to create and edit projects, components, and other design data. Authoring abilities are available in your Altium Designer Develop instance by providing an author seat. An Altium Designer Develop instance get an author seat automatically when it is connected to your Altium Develop Workspace.

For more information about connecting to a Workspace, refer to the Accessing Your Workspace page.

Connect to your Altium Develop Workspace to get an author seat from it and start working in Altium Designer Develop.
Connect to your Altium Develop Workspace to get an author seat from it and start working in Altium Designer Develop.

An Altium Develop Workspace has a limited number of author seats (up to five, depending on how many seats have been purchased. An author seat is released (freed up) when a user closes their Altium Designer Develop instance.

An administrator of your Altium Develop Workspace can monitor the current usage of author seats from the Admin – Usage and Billing page of the Workspace's browser-based interface. From there, administrators can manage the Altium Develop subscription, add author seats (if still available and up to five maximum) and, if required, force release author seats, thus freeing them for other members of the Workspace who need to edit in Altium Designer Develop.

For more information about the Admin – Usage and Billing page, refer to the Exploring the Browser-based Interface page.

  • Altium Designer Develop users get author seats on the 'first come, first served' basis. If you are connected to a Workspace but there are no author seats available (e.g., all available author seats are already in use by other Altium Designer Develop users), your Altium Designer Develop instance will function in Viewer mode.

    In this mode, you still can view content from the connected Workspace (e.g., open projects from the Workspace and explore components through the Components panel) and place comments in project documents (learn more) but you are not able to edit the content in any way and save it to the Workspace.

  • There is no ability to 'roam' an author seat, i.e., acquire it for a specified time. Thus, you always need to be connected to the Workspace in order to work in Altium Designer Develop.

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Feature Availability

The features available depend on your Altium Platform solution access level. Compare features included in Altium Develop and editions of Altium Agile.

If you don’t see a discussed feature in your software, contact Altium Sales to find out more.

Legacy Documentation

Altium Designer documentation, in service of the platform solutions from Altium (Altium Develop and Altium Agile), is no longer versioned. If you need to access documentation for older, standalone versions of Altium Designer, visit the Legacy Documentation section of the Other Installers page.