Altium needs all users within a company to be "mutually aligned"?

Hello,
I went for an interview for an Altium PCB layout job with an electronics company in Southampton. Their Chief Engineer had with him a 16 page document that he had written himself. This document contained all the details about how Altium should be set up within their company. It was very detailed.
Apparently, if there are more than one engineer using Altium within a company, then all of those engineers must ensure that multiple Altium features are set up the same on each of their Altium configurations on their individual PC’s.
If this “mutual setup” is not done, and each engineer uses Altium without “aligning” their Altium with the other engineers in the company, then disaster ensues.
I believe that one problem that happens if the separate Altiums are not “aligned” is that one person will open a PCB layout file, and what he sees as “silk screen”, might actually be “top copper” on the other Altium.

So do you know if there is a guide anywhere on this “Mutual alignment” process that is essential for using Altium within a company.?
(by the way this "mutual alignment" might be essential for all PCB layout packages.......mind you , i know for a fact that its not necessary for Eagle Pro.)

Its more a case of making sure that house style is followed, silk is not a problem (Being standardised out of the box), but the meaning of the various mechanical layers is not fully defined by the package.

So for example layer Mechanical 20 might be used for example for a milling layer, with 21 used for courtyard, 22 for component centroid, 23 for board outline, and it is kind of important that everyone agrees to do this the same way so that library components all share the same use of the mechanical layers.

Same thing applies to things like default sheet templates and default BOM templates, sometimes to defaults for things like database exports from BOMs to the MRP system.

Agreeing this stuff makes defining a standard output job for a 4/6/8 layer board something you have to faff with once, rather then being something you have to set up for every board for example, and it also makes things like BOM templates and standardised default design rule sets much easier (And Altium, like most of the better systems for non trivial boards, is all about defining design rules correctly).

Same thing with things like library structures and such, but this is actually common to any engineering effort involving more then one person.

You do need to agree this stuff if multiple people are contributing to any project, even an eagle one, even things like default grids for schematic symbols are worth setting a house style for, very boring to find that some clown used a imperial grid when you have your symbols defined on a metric one (Or vice versa).

This stuff is really just coding standards for PCB design and how far you want to take it is just as variable as the level of detail in coding standards is.

If you have never done a project involving a large team you might not see the importance, but it matters when you get more then a very few engineers on a project.

Regards, Dan.

Different companies have distinct tolerance to the lack of norms, not only with hardware design but particularly in software development, where the use of style patterns are notably present in the job “culture” being the standardizing part of the Best practices in matter of the project management, which considers design libraries as an asset, if are reusable. The larger staff implyes in the higher chance of someone not following the common sense, applying his own CAD configuration instead of adhering the one informally adopted by the whole department. I particularly think that it is the correct way to manage a development team and should be adopted in all design houses.

In the case of the Altium itself, considering that it is possible more than one person to work online at the same project from remote workstations, and the notorious realization that none software is flawless, the adoption of a unique configuration for all designers does sounds a wise decision.

If you open an existing Altium project, the relevant design settings are loaded with the project. Your personal settings like layer colors are kept according to the last loaded user preferences. In so far there is no risk to mix up the design by e.g. editing the schematic or layout.

You would of course need to use the customers libraries and follow the rules regarding component selection, e.g. only used previously defined parts. If you start a new design, you would use the customers templates. It may be reasonable to load the same preference file as used by the coworkers, but that's no necessarily required.

The difference between design setting and user preferences and their interaction isn't clearly discussed in your post, I think.

Only 16 pages?

Pah, that's nothing, I have documentation, application setup and design guidelines that would fill a ring binder full.

16 pages is light reading imo.