Can I see your ID please...

Having negotiated the irrational drivers of the season outside while finding a parking place, there I was tackling a similar natured beast inside – the rogue trolley driver, complete with emergency stops and erratic directional changes. A total lack of trolley etiquette! Having selected some favourite beers, spirits, and a bottle or three of Shiraz, I had proceeded to the checkout. Ahead in the line were a group of young people, perhaps celebrating the fact that they could now legally buy and consume the amber nectar. The off licence attendant dutifully asked them all to show some form of ID, to prove that they were of the legal age to buy alcohol – and quite right too. As a mixture of ID cards and driver's licenses were sequentially scrutinised and accepted by the attendant's trained eye, it suddenly occurred to me that I had just written about a similar scenario in a document for Altium. The document is a white paper on Altium's server based engineering content management system solution – the Enterprise Vault Server. An Enterprise Vault effectively provides the common ground that connects what we call the Design Space with the Supply Chain Space. The vault facilitates the secure handling of data with high integrity, while providing access to those data to both the design team and the extended supply chain. Having a single, centralised repository by which to share a common data set that is guaranteed in its integrity provides enhanced flexibility, and affords the design team, for one, the creative freedom to innovate – which is where their real passion for the work they do can be found. However, management of data in a way that guarantees its integrity is one thing, but the data also needs to be stored securely, accessible only by those authorised to view or interact with that data. One of the challenges in design data management is therefore data security which, if not properly addressed, can quickly become a headache not just at the design level, but at the wider company level too. Just imagine unauthorised entry and theft of design IP, or unauthorised elevation of data lifecycle states – resulting in the production of something that has not yet been approved for prototype! With security of valuable design IP firmly in mind, the Enterprise Vault caters for this very need through an associated Identity Service, that lets you define who can connect to, and access the vault. All administration for the vault is performed through the vault's browser based interface. Essentially, after installing the vault, you log in to this interface as the de facto administrator, then set up a list of users as required. Adding a new user is simply a case of specifying that person's email address (which becomes their user name). That user will then receive an email at that address, notifying them that they have access to the vault, complete with an initial temporary password, which can be changed after they themselves log in to the vault's browser interface. When a user accesses the vault, the Identity Service checks two things. First, that they are authorised to access the vault – ie their log in credentials (username and password) are valid and that they are on the list of users specified for that vault. And second, if they are accessing the vault from their local installation of Altium Designer, that they are using a valid license of the software under subscription. It's been a long while since I've been asked for age related ID, so needless to say all I was required to produce was the cold hard cash! But in terms of product designs and secure storage of IP, it is reassuring to know that Altium provides a solution that requires stringent authentication of identity before allowing access to those data.