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What is FedMS?

FedMS — Federated Management Services — is a SaaS platform that gives training companies, event agencies, and similar organizations a single place to manage:

  • the organizations they work with (their own org plus their clients and partners),
  • the events they deliver (training programs, workshops, conferences, series),
  • the sessions that make up each event,
  • the people involved in each event in any role,
  • the content that needs to flow to those people (preparation material, presentations, joining instructions, post-event resources),
  • the tasks that every person needs to complete before, during, and after each event, and
  • the communication that ties it all together.

Each customer gets their own Drupal instance. Instances federate with each other so that, when two organizations collaborate on an event, both of them see a coherent, shared view of the same reality — without having to maintain a parallel set of spreadsheets, shared drives, and email threads.

The pitch

Most organizations that run training or events end up gluing together a CRM, a shared drive, an email tool, a project tracker, and a webinar platform — then spending half their week reconciling them. FedMS replaces the glue with a single, opinionated, federated platform that knows what an event is, what a session is, who needs to do what by when, and how to tell them about it. Because the platform is federated, it shares the right view with your clients and partners too — without giving them access to your whole back office.

What makes FedMS different

There are plenty of event-management tools and training platforms. FedMS is built around four ideas that, together, are uncommon:

1. Federation, not centralization

When an event involves more than one organization — a training company, its client, a venue, a guest speaker — each organization usually wants its own data, its own branding, its own user list, and its own audit trail. Centralized platforms force everyone onto one tenant; document clouds force you to share folders manually.

FedMS takes a third path: every organization runs its own instance, and instances exchange the right slices of data with each other automatically. You stay in control of your own data; your clients stay in control of theirs; the platform handles the synchronization.

2. Tasks, not status fields

A workshop is not a row in a calendar — it is a sequence of things that need to happen: brief the speaker, confirm the venue, send pre-reads to delegates, collect signed consents, run the session, gather feedback, issue certificates, archive the recording. FedMS treats each of these as a task with an assignee, a milestone, a window in which it is actionable, and a due date — and generates those tasks automatically from task patterns you define once per event type.

When the world changes — a delegate joins late, the venue moves, a session is cancelled — the right tasks reappear automatically for the right people. Nothing falls through the cracks.

3. Business logic in models, not in code

The rules that drive FedMS — what counts as a task, who is allowed to do what, what happens when a delegate joins or leaves, what email goes out when — are expressed as ECA models (Events-Conditions-Actions) rather than buried in PHP. That means:

  • a customer can adjust their own workflow without forking the codebase,
  • consultants can implement domain-specific behavior in hours rather than weeks,
  • every rule is visible, inspectable, and testable.

ECA is the open-source rules engine for Drupal. FedMS ships ten ECA models out of the box, covering the core workflow; customers and integrators add their own on top.

4. SaaS, but yours

FedMS is delivered as a managed SaaS product — hosted, monitored, backed-up, and upgraded by LakeDrops. But because each instance is a real Drupal installation, you can:

  • export your data at any time,
  • self-host if you outgrow the SaaS offering,
  • extend the platform with custom modules, themes, or ECA models,
  • audit every line of code (the framework is GPL-2.0-or-later).

You get the convenience of SaaS without the lock-in.

The shape of the value

A training company running 200 workshops a year typically spends a significant share of every workshop's profit margin on the operational overhead of running it: chasing speakers, briefing delegates, distributing materials, reconciling rooms and venues, processing feedback, issuing certificates, invoicing. FedMS is designed to shift the bulk of that overhead onto the platform — so the company can either run more events with the same staff or deliver each event with more care for the people in it.

The same logic applies to event agencies, professional bodies running CPD programs, in-house learning-and-development teams, and any organization whose core unit of work is a structured engagement with a known group of people over a defined window of time.

Next steps

  • See Who FedMS is for for the target audiences and typical scenarios.
  • See How it works for a non-technical tour through a typical user journey.
  • See Concepts for a deeper look at the domain model.