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 own 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 or sites), 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 drives their default branding, dashboard and settings
- Users 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 sites simultaneously. Site administrators can change a user's main tenant without removing their other memberships.
Learners who belong to several tenants see all their learning in one place, regardless of which tenant hosts it.
Tenants vs Sites
Tenants and sites are the same entity. The terminology differs depending on the interface and the user’s role.
- Tenant is used in administrative areas that are accessible only to site administrators and tenant administrators.
- Site is used in learner- and manager-facing areas of the platform.
This distinction is for clarity only; it does not indicate a functional difference between tenants and sites.
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 Workplace sites may need to be set up.
