CloudCore VNext.

When a wholesale food supplier needed a system to manage orders, procurement and delivery across hundreds of sites, the team did not build an authentication layer, a notification service or a document store. Those already existed in CloudCore VNext. Development began at the business problem: how orders flow from a site manager's screen to a warehouse pick list and onward to a delivery vehicle.

VNext runs on Microsoft Azure and uses a single-database, multi-schema architecture. The platform's own schemas handle users, workflows, process definitions and archived execution data. Each system built on top adds its own schemas for domain-specific tables (order lines, product catalogues, service tickets) while sharing the platform infrastructure that every business application needs. The result is a system that inherits years of platform maturity on day one, with every new improvement to the core benefiting every system that runs on it.

At the centre of VNext is a workflow engine that does not wait for people to push work forward. Processes are defined as sequences of activities (some requiring human input, others running automatically) connected by flows that carry work from one step to the next. A virtual worker evaluates each activity continuously: checking conditions, routing tasks to the right person, enforcing deadlines and triggering follow-on steps the moment a preceding one completes.

In practice, this means a contract caterer's procurement system can receive a requisition, route it through an approval chain that varies by value and category, generate a purchase order when approval is granted, and notify the supplier, all without anyone remembering what happens next. If a goods receipt does not arrive within the expected window, the engine escalates. If an invoice line does not match the order, the engine flags it for review. The worklist (a task queue that presents each user with exactly the work allocated to them) ensures nothing is lost and nothing is duplicated.

Processes can be scheduled to start at defined intervals, spawned automatically when a condition is met, or initiated manually by a user. They can branch, loop and fork into parallel paths. Every step is recorded in an execution journal, and completed processes are archived with full traceability, who did what, when, and what the system decided at each junction. For operations that run hundreds of concurrent processes, the engine scales by distributing work across multiple processor instances, each of which can be started, paused or stopped independently from an administration console.

VNext provides a document management layer built on Azure Blob Storage. Files are uploaded into named containers, private containers for internal documents, public containers for assets that need external access. Every document is referenced by the system and can be downloaded, streamed or linked to a workflow activity. When a retailer's after-sales service system needs a technician to attach a photograph of a damaged device, the platform handles the upload, stores the file securely and associates it with the service ticket so that anyone who opens that ticket sees the evidence.

The storage layer supports upload with overwrite, deletion, byte-level downloads and asynchronous retrieval for large files. Because documents live in Azure's infrastructure, they benefit from geographic redundancy and the same access controls that govern the rest of the platform. There is no separate file server to maintain and no risk of orphaned attachments, every document exists within the system's security boundary.

VNext does not treat security as an add-on. User authentication, session management and access control are woven into the platform from the ground up. Every user belongs to one or more access pools, named groups that determine which workflow activities they can perform, which screens they can see and which business units they can act on. Access pools are tied to business units, which form a hierarchy: a site belongs to a region, a region belongs to a country. A site manager sees their site's data. A regional manager sees every site in their region. A national director sees everything. The system enforces this automatically. No per-query filtering is needed in the business logic.

Multi-factor authentication is supported natively, with email and SMS one-time passwords generated and verified through the platform's own services. User passwords are managed with configurable policies, PIN-based access is available for operational environments, and every authentication event is logged. Module-level authorisation checks ensure that even if a user has a valid session, they can only reach the parts of the system their access pool permits. For organisations that need to demonstrate compliance, the audit trail is continuous and automatic, every login, every task opened, every approval granted is recorded with a timestamp and a user identity.

VNext includes a KPI framework that goes beyond simple charts on a homepage. Each dashboard is composed of source definitions (queries that retrieve operational data) cached and refreshed on a schedule so that loading a dashboard does not mean running an expensive query against live tables. The caching layer pre-computes results by business unit and time period, which means a regional manager's dashboard loads instantly with data scoped to their region, while a national view aggregates across the entire organisation.

Dashboards render through Highcharts, producing interactive bar charts, line graphs, pie charts and combination visualisations that respond to filters and drill-downs. Beyond live dashboards, VNext supports automated period reports, PDF documents generated on a schedule, capturing a snapshot of performance at the end of a week, month or financial period. These reports are stored as documents within the platform and can be retrieved or distributed automatically. When a wholesale operation needs its procurement managers to receive a weekly summary of order volumes, price deviations and supplier performance, the system generates that report, saves it and can email it. No manual export required.

Rather than leaving teams to build their own connectors, VNext ships with integrations for the services that business systems most commonly need. Email is handled through Azure Communication Services, Exchange Web Services or SMTP, with structured email objects that support templates, attachments and HTML content. The Exchange integration goes beyond sending, VNext includes an inbound email handler that can monitor a mailbox and import incoming messages into the system, enabling workflows that are triggered by external correspondence. SMS messaging is available through multiple providers including Clickatell and SMSPortal, enabling workflow activities to send text notifications, an order confirmation to a site manager, a delivery alert to a customer, a verification code to a user logging in from a new device.

For businesses that run Pastel accounting, VNext provides a synchronisation layer that keeps financial data aligned between the operational system and the accounting package. This is a direct integration, approved invoices, credit notes and payment allocations flow from the business system into Pastel without manual re-entry, and the synchronisation handles the mapping between the operational data model and Pastel's account structure. For organisations whose finance teams live in Pastel, this integration eliminates the double-handling that plagues operations where the business system and accounting system are disconnected.

Excel export is built into the platform's core libraries, capable of generating single-sheet or multi-sheet workbooks from any data set, a procurement team can export a filtered order list, a finance team can pull a month's invoices, and a warehouse can download a pick list, all as formatted spreadsheets ready for offline use.

Google Maps integration allows any business unit with geographic coordinates to be plotted on an interactive map with marker clustering, giving operations teams a spatial view of their network. A contract caterer managing sites across a country can see every location, colour-coded by status or volume, and drill into a specific site from the map itself.

Designing a workflow does not require writing process definitions by hand. CloudCore Architect is a visual design tool (available as both a VS Code extension and a standalone web application) where process engineers lay out activities on a canvas, connect them with flows, define outcomes and set properties like priority, access pool allocation and whether an activity can start a process. The tool enforces thirty-two validation rules before a design can be saved: every process must have a stop point, every activity must be connected, every outcome must be unique. This catches structural errors at design time rather than at deployment.

When a design is saved, Architect generates all the supporting code, the database scripts that register the process, the activity classes that developers implement, the view templates that users interact with. Developers open the generated files and write the business logic: what happens when a purchase order is approved, what data a goods receipt form captures, what conditions cause an invoice to be flagged. The process structure (the flow between steps, the routing rules, the escalation paths) is handled by the engine. The development team focuses on what each step does, not on how work moves between them.

VNext systems deploy to Microsoft Azure with environment-specific configurations that separate development, staging and production. Database changes are managed through a SQL Server database project that tracks every schema, table, stored procedure and deployment script under version control. Pre-deployment and post-deployment scripts run in sequence, ensuring that platform seed data is in place before system-specific data is applied.

The module system means that deploying a new feature is a matter of registering a module, the platform discovers its actions, menus, dashboard items and workflow activities automatically through reflection. VNext's module registrar scans assemblies at startup, identifies classes that extend the platform's module base, and registers them in the database with their routes, menus and workflow bindings. There is no manual wiring of routes or menu entries. When a module is deployed, its embedded views, assets and configuration synchronise with the database, and it appears in the system exactly where it was designed to. This makes releases predictable: the same deployment process works whether the change is a single screen fix or a new operational module spanning dozens of activities.