Status: Public Preview — behaviour may change.

What it does

Maps each plugin component (declarative agent, skill, connector, MCP server, custom engine agent) to the tool that authors it: Agent Builder, Work IQ Dev Tools, Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit, Cowork, Copilot Studio, the Agents SDK, with GitHub Copilot assisting. It also covers the Work IQ Dev Tools quickstart for packaging an existing declarative agent as a plugin.

Key facts

• Starting points by audience: no-code builder, Agent Builder; low-code maker needing workflows, Copilot Studio; pro-code on a declarative agent with source control or CI, Work IQ Dev Tools (preview); lower-level manifest and package control, Agents Toolkit directly; custom engine agent, the Microsoft 365 Agents SDK or another supported custom-engine stack.
• A plugin can use more than one tool. Pick per component.
• GitHub Copilot assists implementation only. It doesn't own the package, validation, publishing or runtime.
• Work IQ Dev Tools is in preview and the whole wiqd plugin command tree is alpha. There's no wiqd plugin publish; public-store submission and administrator upload are separate processes. Some capabilities, agent skills included, need feature flags.
• wiqd agent eval runs quality evaluations against a deployed declarative agent only, not custom engine agents. wiqd devui and the Work IQ commands (list, ask, monitor) are preview or experimental and need to be enabled and authenticated.
• Custom skills in Agent Builder are preview and need Microsoft Frontier Program enrolment.
• Quickstart prerequisites: Node.js 24 or later, PowerShell 7 or later on Windows, a Microsoft 365 account with Copilot access, custom app upload enabled in the tenant, and a local declarative-agent source project.
• The quickstart sequence is sign in, validate, provision to the dev environment, package, deep-validate the ZIP, then share with named users or the organisation, or request publication to the org plugin registry.
• CI authentication for WIQD covers only core lifecycle operations (provision, publish, share). It doesn't authenticate monitoring, evaluation or other extensions.

When to use / skip

Use the matrix when more than one team is building parts of a plugin and nobody has said who owns which artefact. Skip the Work IQ Dev Tools plugin route for anything you can't tolerate changing under you; it is alpha.

Configuration decisions

• One tool and one owner per component, and one system of record (repo) for each.
• Environments: named dev, staging and production are supported in Work IQ Dev Tools, and the quickstart requires dev for sharing to work.
• Static validation in the editor for the inner loop, with CLI validation kept in CI.
• Whether to drive WIQD through GitHub Copilot in the CLI or enter commands directly.

Gotchas

• Provision before you package. Packaging first produces an invalid package.
• The quickstart needs the source project and a lifecycle file (m365agents.yml or teamsapp.yml, local variants included). A published agent, an installed package or a bare ZIP isn't enough, and agents that exist only in Agent Builder or Copilot Studio use those tools' own sharing.
• wiqd plugin import takes Open Plugin, Claude plugin or Cursor plugin formats, not an existing Microsoft 365 declarative agent project.
• Sharing fails if your admins have blocked it. That's a settings conversation, not a CLI bug.
• wiqd plugin delete removes provisioned resources for the environment, not shared packages, catalogue records or external services.

Consultant notes

• Make the tool decision a one-page table at kickoff: component, tool, owner, prerequisites. The upstream readiness checklist is a good exit gate; "which repo is the truth" is the question that's usually unanswered.
• Don't put an alpha command tree in a customer's release pipeline without a fallback to Agents Toolkit. Pin versions and expect commands to move.
• Citizen-built Agent Builder agents rarely graduate cleanly to source control. If you suspect a pro-code future, start in the pro-code tool.
• Check tenant custom-app upload and plugin sharing settings in week one. They gate the quickstart and they're owned by someone who isn't on the project.

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Review when Work IQ Dev Tools or the wiqd plugin surface moves out of preview or alpha, or when the tool matrix changes.