Approva Corporation has unveiled new Office Business Application (OBA) capabilities that simplify compliance by integrating Approva's governance, risk and compliance solutions with the 2007 Microsoft Office system. As a result of the integration, business users will gain on-demand access to controls within the familiar environment of Microsoft Office.

"Regulatory obligations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, are increasing demand for automated controls monitoring solutions, which can help reduce the cost and disruption that compliance often brings to large organizations," said Robert Bernard, general manager of the Worldwide ISV Group at Microsoft Corp. "Extending Approva BizRights as an OBA enables information workers to build compliance-related tasks into their day-to-day business processes by utilizing the applications they already use on a daily basis."

With this integration, Microsoft customers will be able to use their existing investments in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, Microsoft Office Excel 2007 and Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 to more transparently access, share and store information related to controls and compliance to support controls monitoring and analysis, remediation activities and streamline audits.