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Environments

Why the same organization can exist more than once in Canopy, and why your authority stops at one of them.

Overview

An Environment is a separate, self-contained copy of your organization's access control: its own places, its own roles, its own people. Software teams keep more than one so they can try changes somewhere harmless before doing them for real, which is why you will often see names like development, staging, and production.

Environments do not share anything. The same person in two Environments is two records, and a role you hold in one gives you nothing in the other.

Why it matters to you

You will rarely create or configure an Environment, but three consequences reach you directly.

Your authority is granted in one Environment. Administering a region in production says nothing about the same region in staging.A person you administer in one may be absent from another, or present with entirely different roles. Neither is a mistake.Anything you do, an invitation, an assignment, a removal, happens in the Environment you are looking at and nowhere else.

Switching between them

If your authority covers more than one Environment, the Workspace lets you switch between them, and everything on screen changes with it: the people, their roles, the activity, and the list of what you may do. Read that list again after switching, because the answer can genuinely differ. If your authority covers exactly one, there is nothing to switch and the Workspace does not ask.

Who makes them

Creating an Environment, naming its levels, and moving configuration between them are developer work, done in the Developer Console by someone holding the developer capabilities. An account-wide administrator can hold authority over every Environment at once, which is a grant rather than a way of making them. If you need a new one, that is a request to whoever builds your integration.

Next Step

Each Environment has its own roles, and the word means two different things depending on who is holding one. Roles settles which is which.

Environment
API version
v1.0
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