Capabilities & operations

The four surfaces.

For: developers and reviewers

Cardinal's status lives in the database. The outside world sees it through a small set of surfaces — the work-item tracker, the shared SharePoint library, chat, and email. Each is a projection of the system of record, with its own contract for how data flows out and back. The database is the source; the surfaces are radiated views.

DB is the source of truth Surfaces are projections Each has its own contract

Surface by surface

Work-item tracker (Azure DevOps)

Decisions, risks, and tasks radiate to the engagement's Azure DevOps backlog through an enqueue-then-drain queue — writes are queued, then drained with retries and idempotency, so a hiccup never double-writes.

Shared SharePoint library

Cardinal can publish generated reports and artifacts to the engagement's shared SharePoint library — the same library Cardinal watches for human-dropped documents. The database rows stay the source the published copy reflects.

Chat

Direct messages and notifications go to chat — recipient-aware in tone, and always staged for a human before anything customer-facing leaves.

Email

Reports and longer-form comms go by email as drafted, reviewed, and human-sent messages.

Radiate, don't fork. Because every surface reflects the same database rows rather than holding its own copy, the surfaces can't quietly disagree with the system of record. If you want the truth, you look at the database; the surfaces are how that truth is made visible where people work.

How approved artifacts are dispatched to these surfaces →