What people ask us about Hazel

Hazel is a governed knowledge centre that runs inside your Microsoft 365. It gives staff one place to find the procedure, job aid or guide they need, gives authors a governed way to write and update it, and gives compliance the approvals, version records and read confirmations that regulated organizations are asked for. It’s also called the iomer Knowledge Centre Solution.

That’s where Hazel lives too. The difference is that a library of Word files can’t tell staff which section answers their question, which version was in force last March, or who has confirmed they read the latest change. Hazel keeps the content on SharePoint and adds the search, lifecycle and records around it.

Copilot answers from whatever it can find, current or not, approved or not. Hazel makes sure there is one approved, current version to find, with an owner and a review date. The two work together: an agent scoped to Hazel’s published content gives better answers than one scoped to a shared drive.

If you want a separate platform with its own sign-in, there are strong products available. If you want knowledge that lives in your own Microsoft 365, uses the sign-in and intranet staff already have, and keeps content under your own retention and data residency settings, Hazel is built for that.

If you need guided call flows inside a contact-centre agent desktop, we’ll tell you plainly that a dedicated contact-centre tool fits better.

Keep it for board policies if it works. Most policy tools are good at approval and sign-off but hard for frontline staff to search. Hazel is where the procedures and job aids people use every day live, with the same approvals and records.

They’re related, not the same. Hazel is a searchable knowledge centre for large libraries of procedures, job aids and guides, with content types, Word import, staged approvals and required reading. Beacon is for the smaller set of policies every employee must formally sign and sign again on a schedule, plus certifications with expiry dates. Many organizations keep procedures in Hazel and policies in Beacon.

Show us. If it covers what you need, use it. Hazel adds structured content types, staged approvals, version records and a knowledge owner’s console, and it sits on SharePoint pages inside your intranet.

They could build a library with an approval flow. The hard parts are synonyms (SharePoint Online has no search thesaurus), section-level results, reading confirmations by version, “which version was in effect on this date”, review cycles with due dates, separation of duties, Word import, and a console the knowledge owner can run without IT. That design work is what Hazel brings.

Neither. Hazel is a solution accelerator. The hard parts (search, approvals, version records, required reading and the console) are already designed and proven, so you don’t pay for a build from scratch. iomer then builds your organization’s version as a single installation package, with your content types, approval routes, taxonomy and theme, and installs it in your tenant. It’s one of the iomer Solution Accelerators for SharePoint.

iomer does. We build a single installation package for your organization and install it in your tenant with your Microsoft 365 admin, who approves the app and its permissions. There’s nothing for your IT team to assemble.

Quite different where it matters to you: your content types and templates, approval routes and approvers, taxonomy, audiences, review cycles, restricted content and theme are all built for your organization. The foundation underneath (search, approvals, version records, required reading and the audit log) works the same way in every build. That’s deliberate: it’s already built and tested, so you get it without paying to build it again. If you need something the foundation doesn’t do, we’ll scope it with you as additional work.

When iomer improves the foundation, the improvement can go into the next version of your package, built with your configuration kept as it is, and installed by iomer like any other change.

Your knowledge owner manages day-to-day content, synonyms and reviews from Hazel’s console. For bigger changes, such as new content types or approval routes, iomer builds a new version of your package, tests it and installs it.

It’s the biggest part of any knowledge project, which is why Hazel reads Word. Authors fill in a template or import an existing document, headings map to sections, and the same parser runs in bulk with a dashboard for the documents that need a decision. We scope migration separately so you can see the effort.

Required reading asks the right audience to confirm each new version within a window, shows them what changed, and shows managers whether a change has reached their teams. Articles marked reviewed without changes don’t ask again.

Every article has an owner, an approver and a next review date. Overdue content shows a warning or is hidden, depending on the type, and Insights lists what’s overdue by category. Feedback from staff goes straight to the owner.

Hazel is designed at the scale of 1,300 articles across 212 topics. For much larger knowledge bases, we review the list design and archiving with you first.

Multilingual content is a design item. Tell us which languages your staff need and we’ll plan for it during discovery.

No tool does that on its own. Hazel supports your compliance program: staged approvals give the approval record, version history shows what was in effect on any date, periodic review keeps content current, and required reading records who was told.

Yes. Enter the date in an article’s version history and Hazel returns the version in effect then, with its author, approver and change summary. Reading confirmations are recorded against each version, and the audit log exports to CSV.

Yes. Restricted articles use item-level permissions. They’re hidden from search, browse and suggestions for anyone outside the named teams, and they can’t be printed.

In SharePoint lists in your own Microsoft 365 tenant, under your existing security, retention and data residency settings. iomer installs Hazel there for you, and there is no separate vendor platform.

No. Hazel has no separate database, server or vendor cloud, and nothing is hosted by iomer. Articles, versions, reading confirmations and the audit log are SharePoint list items in your tenant.

SharePoint Online and Power Automate, with a Microsoft 365 account for every reader. Hazel’s flows use standard connectors. Dynamic Entra ID groups need Entra ID P1, and AI answers need Microsoft 365 Copilot, pay-as-you-go agent billing or your intranet’s own AI. See Platform and IT for details.

E5, E3, Business Premium and F3 all include what Hazel needs, including Entra ID P1 for dynamic audiences and manually applied retention labels. Automatically applied retention labels need E5 or a Purview add-on, and AI answers need Microsoft 365 Copilot or pay-as-you-go billing. See the plan table.

Hazel is built only on supported Microsoft interfaces: the SharePoint Framework, SharePoint REST, Microsoft Graph and Power Automate standard connectors. It doesn’t change SharePoint’s own page elements or rely on undocumented behaviour. When Microsoft retired SharePoint alerts in July 2026, for example, Hazel wasn’t affected, because its notifications already ran through Power Automate. When Microsoft changes something Hazel relies on, the change reaches you as a new version of your package, built, tested and installed by iomer.

Hazel is built from standard SharePoint and Power Automate parts, so removing it uses standard admin steps: remove the app from your app catalog, turn off its flows, and keep or archive the lists. Your content stays in your tenant either way.

Yes. Staff without an account can’t sign in, search or confirm required reading.

It depends on how many content types and approval routes you need and how much content we migrate, so we scope it with you first. Then we give you a work estimate and a written proposal for building, installing and migrating. How pricing works.

Hazel, Beacon for policy sign-off and Journey for onboarding are built the same way and delivered by the same iomer team, so a customer running one already has the site, the skills and the governance model for the next. A Journey onboarding task can link to a Hazel article like any other page.

Yes. Watch the 30-second tour now, with no sign-up, or book a 30-minute walkthrough set up with a procedure like one of yours.

Yes. Download the two-page datasheet or the four-page brochure. Both are PDFs with no form to fill in.