Welcome to Arclave.
You run the meeting. You weigh the options. You make the call. Arclave walks beside you and makes every step of that decision provable — before, during, and long after the room empties.
A note on this guide: it describes the complete Arclave v1 experience, end to end. A few screens are design previews of features now in engineering, and two product choices — the meeting consent posture and the first two freeze adapters — remain open on the roadmap. The validation instrument is settled: the six-gate Well-Made Decision Test.
Arclave in six ideas.
Everything else in this guide is these six ideas wearing different screens.
Assurance, not authority.
Arclave never makes the decision. It makes sure the decision is worth making — complete, challenged, evidenced, and on the record. The call stays yours. Permanently.
The Case File.
Every decision lives in one place: the problem, the options, the evidence, the people, the dissent. Not scattered across nine tabs and three inboxes.
The Digital Twin.
A living model of your enterprise with a long memory and a fast imagination. It recalls every precedent you ever Sealed and plays out tomorrow before you commit to it.
The Well-Made Decision Test.
Six gates every decision must clear: Complete, Consistent, Conformant, Evidenced, Recorded, Accountable. Clear all six and the decision earns its Seal.
The Seal.
A tamper-evident stamp of assurance. Once Sealed, a record never changes — and anyone, including a regulator, can verify it to the byte.
A layer, not a replacement.
Arclave sits over Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, Jira, and SAP LeanIX. Your tools keep their jobs. Arclave masters exactly one thing: the ratified decision.
Set up once. Decide forever.
Four steps, one cup of coffee. You sign in with the Microsoft account you already own, connect the tools you already use, and seat the people already on your board.
Sign in with Microsoft.
Go to app.arclave.com and choose Continue with Microsoft. Your work account is your Arclave account — no new password to invent, no new password to forget.
Connect Outlook, Teams, and SharePoint.
Open Settings → Connections. Each tile explains exactly what the connection is for — nothing connects without your click, and each one works alone.
Evidence never moves. Arclave links to the document where it lives and stores its fingerprint — a cryptographic hash — so the record can later prove the file never changed. Your files stay exactly where your security team likes them.
Seat your board.
Open People and give each person a role. Three roles cover an Architecture Review Board (ARB): the Decider ratifies, Reviewers challenge and annotate, Viewers read. One rule above all: every decision names exactly one accountable decider. Today, that’s you.
Bring your history in. Optional · recommended
Point the importer at the SharePoint library or Confluence space where your old decision records sleep. Arclave brings them in as-found — verbatim, with source, author, date, and fingerprint — and marks them Registered, never Sealed. History is preserved, never retouched.
The Seal means one thing: this decision passed the gates. Stamping it on history that never took the test would debase it on day one. Old records stay Registered with full provenance; any of them can graduate to Assured later by actually passing the gates — with the graduation on the audit chain. And the gaps the report finds belong to the tooling era, never to the people. Your corpus did well to survive at all.
Frame it before you fight about it.
An assured decision starts before anyone joins the call. Ten minutes of framing saves an hour of circling — and the twin does its homework overnight.
Open a Case File.
From the Console, click New decision. Name what you’re deciding, why now, who sponsors it, and what kind of decision it is. That’s the whole form.
Assemble the case.
The checklist asks for the ingredients of a real decision: at least two options, evidence linked from where it lives, impacts, and the people affected. One option is a conclusion, not a decision — Arclave holds the line on two.
Read the twin’s pre-read.
Overnight, the Digital Twin does what a great chief of staff would: it searches every decision your enterprise ever Sealed, plays your options forward, and lists what the case still lacks. You walk into the room already knowing what’s missing.
Related precedent: DR-2026-014 — Integration Platform Consolidation, Sealed 12 Mar 2026. Option B extends a platform that decision marked for exit. The delta is attached.
Under Option B, the twin projects the bus crosses its safe-capacity ceiling in Q3 2027 — one quarter before the deferred migration completes. Confidence: moderate; the projection and its inputs are attached.
Two items still open before the gates can pass: no rollback plan on the record · security impact unassessed.
Invite Arclave to the meeting.
On the Case File, switch on Meeting Presence and pick Thursday’s board call. Arclave joins your Teams meeting the way any attendee would — visibly, with everyone’s consent, and with nothing kept it doesn’t need.
Run the room. Arclave watches your blind side.
You facilitate exactly as you always do. Arclave sits in the side panel and speaks only when assurance requires it — in four kinds of sentences, and only those four.
The four sentences Arclave speaks
“What’s still missing.”
“No rollback plan is on the record yet.” The case’s open items, stated plainly, so the room can close them while it’s still cheap.
“What you already decided.”
“This conflicts with DR-2026-014, Sealed in March — here’s the delta.” The enterprise’s own precedent, recalled at the exact moment it matters.
“What tomorrow looks like.”
“Under Option B, the twin projects a capacity breach in Q3 2027.” Each option played forward against the model of your estate, error bars included.
“What your governance forbids.”
“Option B keeps an end-of-life platform in production past policy EOL-001.” Your own rules, applied as code — before the decision, not in the post-mortem.
We tested the tempting promise — formally, in pre-registered, openly published research. A board of artificial experts did not out-decide its own best single member, and it was never staged against your human experts at all. So Arclave routes all of its intelligence into checking rather than choosing: it recommends what to fix, never what to pick. The judgment stays where it belongs — with you and your board.
Watch the panel as the discussion moves.
Arclave recognizes when a decision is forming and raises interventions in the side panel — quietly, to the room, with receipts attached. Nothing interrupts the speaker; everything lands on the record.
Option B conflicts with DR-2026-014, Sealed 12 Mar 2026. View the delta →
Option B: safe-capacity ceiling crossed Q3 2027, before migration completes.
Still open: rollback plan · security impact.
Ask the question that changes the meeting: “What are we missing?”
Say it out loud or click it. Arclave answers with the gate preview — the six gates of the Well-Made Decision Test, each one green or amber, with the exact items still open. Assign each open item an owner in the room, and watch the gates close in real time.
Play tomorrow before you commit to it.
Click Run what-if and the Digital Twin plays each option forward against the living model of your estate — capacity, cost, timeline, dependencies. Projections come with stated confidence and every input on display. The twin shows its work; the room draws its conclusions.
Option A — migrate now projects clean
Option B — extend 12 months breach projected
Call it. That part is all you.
When the room is ready, open the Decide sheet. Pick the verdict, attach the conditions the discussion produced, and record the dissent — in full. Dissent is a first-class citizen of a well-made decision; your successor will thank you for it.
2. Security impact assessment linked within 30 days — owner: Priya N.
Seal it. Around here, that’s a verb.
You adjourn. The record is already written. Read it once, run the test, hand the future its baton — and press Seal.
Review the draft record.
At adjournment the Case File assembles itself into a draft Assurance Record: who attended, which options were weighed, every intervention raised and how the room answered it, the evidence links, your verdict, the conditions, the dissent. Read it once. Fix anything the room said differently.
Run the Well-Made Decision Test.
Six gates, scored like a chain — the weakest link is the score. When a gate fails, Arclave names the exact sentence to fix. No mysteries, no vibes.
Hand the future its baton.
A Sealed decision isn’t a finish line — it’s a handoff. Three fields ride inside the Seal: the open conditions, the outcome you expect, and the date you’ll check. Six months from now, nobody will wonder what this decision promised.
Press Seal.
Arclave stamps the record with a cryptographic fingerprint, files it on the tamper-evident chain, and mints its Decision Record number. From this second the record never changes — corrections append beside it, never over it — and mastery of the decision transfers to Arclave. Wherever your meeting notes live, they now point here.
Three things, no more and no less: this record passed all six gates; a named human ratified it; and from the moment of Sealing, any change to a single byte becomes detectable by anyone who checks. The Seal never claims the decision is right — it proves the decision was well made. Time gets to judge the rest, and the Outcome Ledger gives time its ledger line.
Tell everyone. Once. On the record.
A decision nobody hears about is a decision that gets re-litigated in six months. From the Sealed record, Arclave drafts the announcement, you approve it, and it goes out through your own Outlook and Teams — then logs exactly who was told, and when.
Open Announce on the Sealed record.
Pick the audience: your Outlook mailing list, your Teams channel, or both. Arclave writes the draft from the record itself — the verdict, the why, the conditions. No spin is available to it; it can only say what the record says.
Why: Vendor support ends Q2 2027; the twin projects a capacity breach under any deferral; the move aligns with DR-2026-014.
Conditions: rollback plan before wave 1 (Marcus T.) · security assessment within 30 days (Priya N.).
Review by: 15 January 2027 · Dissent recorded and preserved.
The announcement links to the record; it never attaches it. One canonical copy exists, forever, at one address. Forwarded email rots — the link stays true.
The decision keeps working after you stop.
Most tools forget a decision the moment it’s made. Arclave is just getting started: conditions get tracked, the review date arrives on schedule, and the outcome gets written down next to the promise.
Watch the conditions discharge.
“Approved with conditions” where nobody checks the conditions is theater. Each open condition sits on your Console until it’s discharged with evidence — and the discharge itself lands on the audit chain.
The review date arrives. Answer four questions.
On 15 January, Arclave taps you on the shoulder: the baton said to check. The After-Action Review asks exactly four questions — what did we expect, what actually happened, why the difference, and what changes next.
The Sealed record stays exactly as the room made it — that’s the whole point of a Seal. The outcome writes beside it on its own ledger, so your enterprise learns whether its decisions keep their promises without ever rewriting history. Two ledgers: what you decided, and what happened. Auditors dream about this.
Close the loop with the Three R’s.
Every reviewed decision earns one of three fates: Reaffirm it as-is, Revise it with a new decision that cites this one, or Retire it with honors. No zombie decisions haunting the estate, no “wait, is that still policy?”
Then watch the interest compound.
Six months from now, in a different meeting, someone proposes rebuilding on the old bus. The twin clears its throat: “DR-2026-041, Sealed in July, decided otherwise — here’s why, and here’s how it turned out.” One sentence, and a settled argument stays settled. That’s institutional memory earning interest. That’s the point of all of it.
The whole system on one screen.
The six gates — the Well-Made Decision Test
- Complete — at least two real options, impacts named, nothing material missing.
- Consistent — squares with your Sealed precedent, or the conflict is resolved on the record.
- Conformant — passes your own rules and policies, applied as code.
- Evidenced — every load-bearing claim links to a fingerprinted source.
- Recorded — verdict, conditions, dissent, and rationale, all on the record.
- Accountable — one named human decider ratified it.
Scored like a chain: the weakest gate is the score.
The four sentences Arclave speaks
- Completeness — “Here’s what the case still lacks.”
- Memory — “Here’s what you already decided, and the delta.”
- Simulation — “Here’s what tomorrow looks like under each option.”
- Rules — “Here’s what your own governance forbids.”
Never a fifth sentence. Never “choose B.” It recommends what to fix, never what to pick.
Five things Arclave never does
- Never votes, never decides. The verdict belongs to a named human. Always.
- Never Seals what never passed the gates. Imported history stays Registered, as-found.
- Never edits a Sealed record. Corrections and outcomes append beside it.
- Never moves your files. Evidence stays home — linked by reference, fingerprinted.
- Never holds your record hostage. Leave any time with a complete, verifiable export.