The Postman Collaboration Webinar

Matt Ball

Postman

Solutions Engineer

Postman makes collaborating on API development easier for you in many ways. Specifically, in this recent webinar we covered team workspaces, collections, and environments, all of which will help you sharpen collaboration across your team and other teams in your organization. Your fantastic host, Postman Solutions Engineer Matt Ball, also discussed best practices for managing changes in collections such as changelog, roles and permissions, and fork and merge.

Aired: December 17, 2019

View the slides

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Postman support offline/on-prem collaboration?

Currently we do not offer an on-premises version of Postman. In order to persist your Postman data, you'll need to log in to your Postman account and utilize our cloud


How do the free and paid Postman plans differ?

Postman offers all of its services and the majority of features to all users, regardless of plan type. To find your account's usage limits, please check out our feature matrix or your usage dashboard.


What about security?

Postman's security policies are available here. Please reach out with any further questions or organization-specific inquiries.


Can I be a member of multiple teams?

At this time, a Postman account can only be a part of a single team.


We never have more than x people working in Postman on a project—can I add and remove team members as needed?

Postman licenses are transferable between users and can be reassigned whenever you'd like. You can find more on team management in our docs.


How do I create a team workspace?

Check out our docs on how to create workspaces.


How do I share a workspace with my teammates?

See our docs on sharing workspaces.


If I start with a personal workspace and later want to share it, can it be converted to a team workspace?

Yes! In the app, you'll see an option to Invite your teammates. Upon inviting them, it will be automatically converted to a team workspace.


Are workspaces supported in Newman?

Newman is a command-line collection runner, so workspace navigation is beyond its scope. However, you can use Newman with the Postman API to retrieve workspace information.


How can I share a personal collection or environment with others?

Sharing a personal collection to a team workspace only changes the visibility of the collection—it does not create a copy of the collection.


When a collection is shared, will anybody with access to it see changes?

Yes, all changes to shared collections are synced across workspaces. To get around this, you can create a copy of the collection and edit it first before editing the original collection.


Can we move collections across workspaces instead of sharing them?

Yes—to do this, share the collection, then remove it from the original workspace.


I want to store an environment variable in my team workspace, but make sure my teammates cannot access it—is this possible?

Yes—check out session variables.


If I have environment variables setup in a team workspace, can I use those variables to execute scripts that are in my personal workspace?

You'll need to share the environment to your personal workspace in order for your variables to be resolved.


How do globals behave in forks?

Global variables are associated with workspaces, so they'll resolve as long as the collection is within the correct workspace.


We have multiple vendors working on a customer's API landscape on multiple projects—how would you recommend organizing workspaces and permissions?

Ideally, you would create a private workspace for each vendor to keep them completely separate. Permissions would depend entirely on the level of control you'd like to provide the vendors. Please feel free to share your use case with us, so that we can work with you to find the right setup.


What is the best practice for setting up a Production, QA, and Development environment—should they be separate workspaces or the same with different environments?

Postman doesn't prescribe a specific format for how you should configure your workspaces, collections and environments. The path you choose to take will depend on your team size and use case amongst other things. See this blog post for more information.


As an admin, am I able to edit locked collections added by another team member?

You will not be able to edit collections unless the original author grants you editing access. If you have a view-only role for a collection, you will need to request edit access.


If a user is granted only view access, will that allow them to edit things like request parameters or does it prevent any editing of any kind?

A view-only user will be able to make certain edits to send a request, but will not be able to save those changes to the base collection. They can, however, create a fork and tag the collection admin in a comment to review said fork and merge it into the master collection.


Can viewers merge forks or is only the admin able to?

View-only users can send team members with edit access a link to their merge page in the Postman Dashboard, or leave them a comment asking them to merge their fork.


If you have two editors on a collection and both make changes, how are those merged?


Can you comment on a collection that is not forked?

Yes, you can add comments to any collection or request. Check out commenting on collections.


Is the restore option available to everyone?

Pro and Enterprise plans come with a collection changelog that anyone with edit permissions can use to restore past versions.


Can we have private documentation, only available to our team?

Yep—check out our docs on viewing private documentation.


Can I fork a collection from the API Network and ask the owner to merge changes?

This is not currently possible.


How does Postman fit into a CI/CD pipeline?

We recommend Newman for this, learn more here.


Is there a way to sync a collection with a GitHub repo?

Paid Postman teams can utilize our direct integration with Github. Learn more, here.


In order to post our API in Postman API Network, do we need to be enrolled in the enterprise plan?

Nope—as of recently, anyone can publish to the API Network.


How do I become a “Featured” API on the API Network?

Featured APIs are curated by the Postman team—we look for well-documented APIs that clearly show users how to interact with them.


Are all team profiles public or can you control your team profile's visibility?

You can unshare your team profile, however that will also unpublish all of the collections associated with your team.


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