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If you want to provide your users with a multitenancy experience, but you’re happy to have centralised user management, you may not need to enable Totara’s multitenancy features. Instead, you could use audiences to replicate a tenanted experience.

In this video, we’ll have a look at how that’s done.

Let’s start by creating an audience.

I’ll add a new audience, which will be for all users working in the UK arm of my organisation.

I’ll give it a name, create it as a dynamic audience so users are automatically added based on a rule set and save my changes.

I’ll add my rule set by selecting the user’s Organisation and approve the changes to add users to my audience.

I’ve done that quickly, but if you want more information about setting up audiences do watch the separate video on creating a dynamic audience. All users within the UK Limited organisation have now automatically been added to my audience. So what can I do now? Well, on my site all users go to the My Learning dashboard by default on login.

But I can provide my audience with their own bespoke landing page instead. I’ll choose to Manage dashboards and create a new dashboard.

Under Availability, I can restrict access to this dashboard to only my audience.

I’ll create my dashboard and move it to the top of this list so that it is the primary dashboard for my audience.

And of course, I need to build the dashboard itself by adding blocks of content to it.

Let’s assume I’ve now done that.

So, users in my audience now have a different experience as soon as they access the site. What next? Well, I can tailor the main navigation items at the top to use more appropriate terms, and make these available only to my audience.

I’ll add a new menu item, give it a title, a location to link to when selected and choose to make it visible using custom access rules.

When I add my menu item, I’ve taken immediately to this page where I can choose my audience.

I’ll save my changes to see the menu item appear in the navigation.

I can do the same with other page elements too. If I have a course page which is shared with users across the site, I have the option of making individual tiles within a featured links block visible only to my audience.

Again, I can choose my audience here.

This tile is now only available to users within my audience, even though the course may be available to a wider group of users.

Speaking of course availability, the course catalogue is another place that audiences can be used. As a user, I only see content that is visible to me on the site.

To allow courses to be restricted by audience, I first need to enable audience-based visibility at site level, by going to Configure features and enabling this setting.

Now if I go to a course and edit the course settings, you can see this new section: Audience-based visibility. I’ll choose to make this course available only to my audience.

If a user now views the catalogue, this course will only appear if they are within our audience.

Finally, I could also restrict access to individual activities within a course. For example, I might have specific UK policies I want to include.

To do this I’d simply go to the course page, add my new activity and within the Restrict access section, I’ve got the option to Add restriction to this activity, which can be based on a range of factors including audience.

Now let’s login as a member of my audience to see what their experience is like.

On login, I’m taken straight to my audience dashboard, which could contain branded content specific to my audience. I’ve got access to my UK policies from the main navigation and if I go to the course catalogue, I can see this course which is only available to my audience.

And of course, as a Site Administrator I can also create reports using Report builder and add audience as a filter, so I can create reports based just on activity relating to my audience.

Hopefully you can see how you could create a multitenancy experience using a range of audiences on your site – perhaps by creating a different audience for different partner organisations or different brands within your group. Of course, this approach isn’t suitable for all use cases, which is why Totara’s multitenancy feature has been developed.

User management is still centralised, and there’s no isolation between users in common spaces, so if those things are important to you, audiences isn’t the answer. But if you want to restrict access and provide specific content to groups of users, it’s definitely worth exploring.