Starting a Tenant Populated
A new tenant can start populated from the master tenant rather than empty.
Where to find it
Architect Panel → Configuration:
- Multitenancy — the tenants themselves
- Custom Tenant Information Fields — your own fields on a tenant
- Instance Configuration Fields — settings held per tenant
Architect Panel → Data:
- Datastores — the initialisation mode and shared-data flag on each
What gets copied
Not everything. Data is copied for datastores whose initialisation mode marks them as eligible and which are not flagged as holding shared data.
That second condition matters: shared datastores are already visible to every tenant, so copying them would create a second, divergent copy of data that was meant to be common.
Curate the master tenant
The consequence of this feature is that your master tenant is a template. Whatever is in an eligible datastore is what every new customer starts with, including test records somebody left there.
Review it before enabling this, and again periodically.
What is worth copying
- Example records that show what the product does.
- Starter configuration — categories, statuses, templates.
- Reference lists a tenant will edit for itself.
Reference data a tenant will not edit belongs in a shared datastore instead, so it is maintained once.
What is not
Anything with real names in it. The master tenant is where somebody demonstrated the product to a real prospect, and copying that into every new customer’s account is a data breach delivered automatically.
Empty is a bad first impression
A new customer signing in to nothing has to imagine what the product does. A tenant with three example records and a configured workflow shows them, and the difference in whether they come back is substantial.
Make examples obviously examples
Named so nobody mistakes them for real, and easy to delete in one action. Sample data that looks real ends up quoted in a meeting.
Test what a new tenant actually gets
By creating one and looking, rather than by reasoning about the settings. The eligible-datastore rule is easy to get wrong in either direction, and the symptom — a new customer with the wrong starting data — is one your customers report rather than your monitoring.
Worked example
A platform copies example records and starter configuration into every new tenant, with country and currency lists held as shared datastores instead. Examples are prefixed so they are unmistakable. A test tenant is created after any change to the master, and the copy is checked.
Recommendations
- Treat the master tenant as a template and curate it.
- Never copy real customer data — check before enabling.
- Shared datastores for data tenants will not edit.
- Create a test tenant and look at what it got.