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copyright: year: 2024 last updated: 2024-06-07
Overview of apps and skills
Apps and skills are interconnected and help you to accomplish your work. The following topics introduce apps and skills and how you can use them.
Apps
An app is a self-contained software that groups a collection of skills built to help you complete your tasks. See Apps.
The skill catalog on Orchestrate contains a list of all the available apps. Although some apps require access to the Standard edition, most of them are accessible to all users. See skill catalog.
In the skill catalog, you can select an app and see all the skills that you can use. The following GIF illustrates selecting an app from the skill catalog and viewing the skills that the app offers:
Skills
A Skill is a capability that is used to accomplish a piece of work, or a task. A skill flow is a collection of skills from different apps. That means that you can use skills to do certain tasks on Orchestrate, freeing you to focus on what you do best.
As an example, take the author of this content. First, they had to research and compose this content, and that is one skill. Second, they had to render and publish it to the internet, and that is another skill. It means that the author was able to put together two fundamental skills to produce a complete work.
With IBM watsonx Orchestrate, you can do the same by using skills.
Consider the following diagram to visualize individual skill, skill group, and what a skill set can do for you related to skills:
On Orchestrate, skills are made up of related actions. That is, a skill is either one action or a collection of actions that together accomplish a piece of work. For example, adding a row to an Excel table is an action. It’s a single action that accomplishes a task. The complexity of a skill can range dramatically. A skill can be as simple as a singular action or as elaborate as needed to complete some task.
For example, you work in HR and you love interviewing candidates and have a knack for finding talent when one-on-one with a prospective candidate. But you don’t love the process of looking at LinkedIn and sending emails. You think to yourself that it might be easily automated. Therefore, you can use Orchestrate to create a skill that finds candidates on LinkedIn, collects a list of all candidates, and emails those candidates about the opportunity. You can create another skill that sends out calendar invites for interviews to that list. You can link those skills together to automate the entire pipeline of obtaining candidates on that platform.
You can create your skills by using a set of convenient connectors to services like Box, Google Drive, and Gmail. Think about all the skills and work patterns that you see every day that you can automate:
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Common business tasks that include managing international schedules, math functions, reminders.
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Events that include sending emails, scheduling, managing files.
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Business applications that include fetching, updating, and moving data.
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Business data analysis that includes getting insights and recommendations from AI to make informed decisions.
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Working with people, such as assigning work, managing schedules, submitting ideas, getting approvals.
The possibilities are limitless.
When you craft a skill, you provide everything, from the API endpoint to the rules that dictate how a user can use a skill. See more in Adding skills from files.
When you define a skill, it can be as simple or complex as it needs to be. From completing a single task or to connecting several tasks together. Users see the entire process as a single skill execution. However, there are three types of skills in Orchestrate as listed in the following table:
| Skill type | Description |
|---|---|
| Imported | - Imported skills are created by importing the OpenAPI document for a service. - Imported skills behave like primitive skills, except that they might be included on a per tenant basis. - The capability and presentation of imported skills are defined in their OpenAPI document. |
| Primitive | - Primitive skills come from internal IBM connectors and are derived from operations that are exposed by applications that are hosted as a service, for example, Salesforce and ServiceNow. - Similar to innate skills, primitive skills are prebuilt to Orchestrate. |
In Orchestrate, imported skills have two statuses. The following table list these statuses.
| Status | Description |
|---|---|
| Ready to publish | - If the OpenAPI specification of a newly added skill successfully passes the x-ibm-annotations validation, it is set to the Ready to publish status.- During the x-ibm-annotations validation,
the system verifies that all required annotations are present and that any optional annotations added have the appropriate values.- If an OpenAPI file is imported without the required x-ibm-annotations, the system automatically
adds them. |
| Published |
|
Checking out how to use a skill and what skills can do
From the skill catalog, select the app that you want to add. Then, you can view specific information about the skills that the app offers, such as:
- A description of the skill.
- The phrase that you must give to run the skill.
- The data that the skill set requires from you to complete the work.
- A confirmation that the work was completed
The following GIF illustrates how you can view skill information from the skill tile:
What to do next
Learn to use, manage, and build skills and apps based on your role on Orchestrate.
| User role | Details |
|---|---|
| You can start to use the skills. | |
| Apart from accessing the apps and running skills, you can build skills from apps and OpenAPI files, combine skills into skill flows, enhance your skill, and more. | |
| Apart from using and building apps and skills, you can also monitor the skill usage of your team. |
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