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OpenWork gives agents three building blocks. The connector reaches the system; the skill is the playbook; the plugin is the bundle.

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Choose the right unit

MCP is the open standard underneath many connectors, but day to day you can think in terms of apps, connectors, skills, and plugins.

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Connect the system first

Use connectors for the apps themselves. In the desktop app, start in Settings > OpenWork Connect; for the click-by-click flow, see Connect your services. Everything your agent can use is listed in Settings > Extensions, under Available apps and Your apps. Use Add Custom App to connect something we do not list yet.

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Add skills when the connector is thin

A connector may reach your ticketing system but still be awkward: an incident may need exact fields, a priority change may need a safe sequence, or one ticket action may behave badly. Write skills for those system rules:
  • how to file an incident with the right fields;
  • how to update a customer note without losing context;
  • how to work around an unreliable ticket action.
These skills describe the system, not one person’s style, so everyone who uses that system needs them.

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Bundle system skills into a plugin

Everything is a plugin under the hood. When you ask OpenWork to create a skill, OpenWork creates a small plugin containing that one skill, so “skill or plugin?” is not a decision most people need to make. The useful plugin case is a thin connector with several system skills. If half a dozen ticketing skills make one system usable, bundle them into one plugin — the ticketing unit — and share that single thing. For distribution options, see Publish and copy a skill.

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Keep personal skills separate

Use connectors for systems. Use plugins to bundle the skills that make a system usable. Personal or workflow-specific skills can stay individual unless a team should receive them together.