Totara Seedlings

Free Community Version of Popular LMS

Wellington (NZ), April 2014 - Totara Learning Solutions has announced a significant change in its open-source distribution strategy. Since its launch in 2011, TotaraLMS has been offered as a distribution of the popular education platform, Moodle. For a low-cost subscription fee, customers receive the benefit of code support and maintenance, security updates, error correction, patch updates, and a continuing stream of new innovations supported by Totara Learning Solutions. Now, in addition to its enterprise offering, Totara Learning will also offer Totara Seedlings, an unsupported version of the popular software.

Totara chief executive Richard Wyles said, "We have always seen ourselves as an extension of the Moodle community and have always offered our innovations. Some in the team have been involved in the Moodle project for over ten years now. We will continue to offer code back to Moodle, and with Seedlings we move into the broader public domain. We believe Seedlings is the most effective way to do this, compared to our previous direct approach such as our work on Open Badges for Moodle. It might not have been clear just how much we do in the open-source realm."

Totara Seedlings is a great way for software developers to get to know Totara and engage in the project. It will also allow potential customers to evaluate the features including upcoming versions.

Richard Wyles added, "We don't believe in dumbing down our community version to bait customers into buying our enterprise edition. Quite the opposite, Seedlings is the beta version containing our very latest innovations, and the first version of Seedlings is Version 2.6, the beta version of our upcoming production release of TotaraLMS Enterprise.

As the name implies, Totara Seedlings contains young, even experimental code, so it's not suitable for use in a production setting. It's our way of contributing our thinking, our IP and our code, but our business is in offering enterprise-ready open-source software fully supported by our team and partners. Our mission is to bring the benefits of open source to the corporate learning-technologies marketplace."

Totara LMS 2.6 has a wide range of new features, including a powerful enhancement to the Learner Catalog system, enabling organizations to define how training opportunities are presented.