Northwind Demo — User Guide

Northwind Group Demo Vault

This is a demonstration of how Company OS Starter adapts to Northwind Group’s structure (6 divisions × 4 regions, OOH media + film production + blockchain).

What’s different from the public demo

• Config has Northwind’s real divisions + regions
• Notes use industry-specific content (OOH plans, film briefs, tokenization ADRs)
• Division MOCs for Media / Production / Blockchain

Explore

• Open _Meta/dashboard.md
• Graph view shows cross-division links
• Try a Bases view: type = client grouped by division

This is demo data

All names fictional. The live engagement replaces this with real structure.

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Getting started (first 10 minutes)

1. Open the vault — File → Open folder as vault, pick this folder. On Obsidian 1.9+ everything works with no plugins to install.
2. Start at the dashboard — open _Meta/dashboard.md. It links every division and the live dashboards.
3. Open a dashboard — e.g. the CRM pipeline or SOP health board. These are Obsidian Bases files; they read the notes live, so adding a note with the right type: makes it appear.
4. Create a note from a template — the templates in _Meta/templates/ carry the frontmatter the dashboards rely on (type, owner, status, division). Copy one, fill it in, and it shows up on the matching board.
5. Everything is a plain Markdown file. No database, no lock-in — you can read and edit the vault with any text editor.

Backup & sync — recommendation

Pick one sync method and one backup method. They are different jobs: sync keeps devices in step; backup lets you recover a file you broke last week.

Sync (keep devices in step)

Option	Best when	Notes
Obsidian Sync (paid)	you want the least setup and mobile that “just works”	end-to-end encrypted, per-vault, handles conflicts. The lowest-friction choice for a team.
iCloud / OneDrive / Dropbox	you already pay for one and it’s desktop-only	works, but folder-sync tools handle simultaneous edits poorly — do not edit the same note on two devices at once.
Git (this vault ships it)	you want versioned history and are comfortable with git	see backup below — git doubles as sync for technical teams.

Backup (recover a past version)

This vault ships Obsidian Git (.obsidian/plugins/obsidian-git/), configured for manual backup on purpose — you commit when you mean to, so a snapshot is never taken mid-edit. To back up: Source Control → Commit, or run git commit yourself. Every commit is a restore point; Source Control → restore (or git checkout) rolls any file back to any prior version. That is the vault’s real undo — the web app deliberately has none, because git is the history layer.

Do not turn on Obsidian Git auto-commit unless you understand the trade-off: an automatic commit can snapshot a half-finished edit, and if a pre-commit check fails it can fail silently — a backup that lies is worse than no backup. Commit deliberately.

Mobile

Obsidian’s mobile apps (iOS / Android) open the same vault. Two things to know:

• Bases dashboards render on mobile in Obsidian 1.9+ — the tables are scrollable. The Dataview editions (_Meta/dataview-dashboards/) also work if you have the Dataview plugin, which is available on mobile.
• Sync is what makes mobile useful. Obsidian Sync is the smoothest path to the vault on a phone; the git plugin also runs on mobile but is fiddlier. Folder-sync tools (iCloud/Dropbox) are unreliable on mobile — avoid them if the vault is edited from more than one device.

Keep notes short and rely on the dashboards for navigation, and the vault stays comfortable on a small screen.