Multi-tenancy
This feature is part of Moodle Workplace™, which is available through Moodle Certified Partners and Service Providers only. |
Multi-tenancy allows you to give each of your divisions, departments or franchises their own full LMS platform with custom permissions so you can delegate the LMS management to the people actually doing the job. |
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Tenants are isolated entities with their look and feel, structure, users, and learning entities. They are critical for when you wish to represent multiple self-contained business entities in your organisation.
Multi-tenancy has been implemented as a single instance of Moodle Workplace that serves multiple client organisations (tenants), where its data and configuration are virtually partitioned, and each client organisation works with a customized virtual application instance.
Multi-tenancy is the ability to enable the configuration for multiple tenants with different themes and permissions, keeping them separated so that users in one tenant cannot see the users in another. Each tenant has its own users, hierarchies, roles, dynamic rules, theme settings, reports, and learning entities (courses, programs, and certifications).
The overall multi-tenancy architecture of Moodle Workplace can be summarised as follows:
- Site-wide features are global and apply across tenants
- Tenant-aware features can be configured for each tenant
- Every user has one main tenant, which which drives their default branding, dashboard and settings
- Every user can also belong to any number of secondary tenants
Secondary tenants support organisations that require users—particularly managers, trainers, and administrators—to operate across multiple tenants simultaneously. Site administrators can change a user's main tenant without removing their other memberships.
Unified Multi-tenancy (UMT)
Moodle Workplace provides a distinctive multi-tenancy framework that allows users to belong to multiple tenants while maintaining a single account. This approach is called unified multi-tenancy (UMT). This section introduces its fundamental concepts.
A tenant is an isolated entity with its own users, hierarchies, roles, dynamic rules, theme settings, reports, and learning entities (courses, programs, and certifications).
Every user has one main tenant, which determines their default branding, dashboard, and settings.
Users may also belong to any number of secondary tenants. This enables organisations to support users—particularly managers, trainers, and administrators—who need to work across multiple tenants.
A user who belongs to more than one tenant is referred to as a shared user.
Site administrators can change a user’s main tenant without removing their other tenant memberships. They can manage any user, regardless of tenant membership.
By contrast, tenant administrators can manage a shared user only if they are administrators in all of that user’s tenants. If a tenant administrator lacks access to even one of the user’s tenants, the user cannot be managed by them.
The following user management operations can be carried out by a tenant administrator:
- Add existing users from other tenants into their tenant
- Remove a user from their tenant (when it is a secondary membership), with protection against removing from the main tenant
- Make or remove a user as tenant administrator
A user with tenant administration permissions is a tenant administrator in every tenant to which they belong.
Managers who supervise users across tenants see their staff on a single dashboard, in reports, and elsewhere, unless configured otherwise.
Learners who belong to several tenants see all their learning in one place, regardless of which tenant hosts it. The catalogue displays courses and programs from every tenant to which the learner belongs, and search covers all of them.
Shared Space enables entities to be shared across all tenants. It functions like a special tenant in which users can create supported entities that are available in other tenants.
All Moodle Workplace tools are multi-tenant aware; depending on the feature, different levels of multi-tenancy are supported.
Privacy considerations
All user information from each tenant is stored in the same database and table. However, by default, no personal data is shared between tenants, and each remains unaware of the others. This design aligns with Moodle’s commitment to GDPR requirements for data protection by default and by design.
Administrators can choose to enable sharing between tenants, allowing users to see others from different tenants. This includes visibility in forum posts, course participant lists, gradebooks, reports, and other modules that display participant information.
Certain professional or institutional bodies may require that data not be stored alongside that of other entities. If physical separation of tenants is required, multi-tenancy may not be suitable, and separate Moodle sites may need to be set up.
