Altium Concord!

[JohnsonMiller]

Hi Guys,

I come across Altium Concord Pro, wondering do you have any experiences with this tool? What task of board design it is targeted for?
Is it a standalone and separate tools, or is somehow pluggable tool for AD?

Regards,

[robertferanec]

I have played with Concord Pro for some time. I wanted to make a video about it, but ... I am not planning to use Concord Pro in my own company so in final I didn't make the video. Concord Pro is basically a system where you can manage your projects and libraries - if you do not use Concord Pro, you have to setup everything by yourself e.g. database, libraries, svn / git, file versioning etc. Also Concord Pro integrates everything together and it is well supported directly in Altium (so with Concord you can for example see where components are used - not possible with external libraries).

However - it is an extra cost (you have to pay extra licenses) and what I do not like ... it is a piece of software which you feed up with hours and hours of your work and you do not have control over that software (you do not have full control over the hours and hours of your work). So, simply to say, once you start using it, there is no simple way to go away from it - you will have to keep paying the licenses.

Concord PRO is an independent stand alone piece of software running on your server (or on a PC in your company or in cloud). Simply to say, Altium can connect (everything what you need to set in Altium is address, login & password to your Concord Pro) to this software and once you are connected, you can work with the content you stored in Concord - you can work with projects, libraries, components, templates, etc .... all this will be then easily accessible and manageable from Altium.

Now, even it looks like once you have Concord Pro, you have full setup for perfect Hardware Development department - you still need to come up with some rules how your team is going to use it - e.g naming conventions, structures, etc. - you need to agree on the rules so everybody is using it the same way. So, once you installed Concord Pro and you have it running, there is still some work to do until it can be fully used to it's possibilities.

Some companies may love it - especially the companies with bigger teams or companies what need to follow standards. But then maybe go for NEXUS (Simply to say Altium + Concord with installation and setup tailored to specific company).

[JohnsonMiller]

Thank you Robert for the clear explanation.