Administration

All companies must take all reasonable steps to protect the personal and sensitive information of their employees. As per recommended security-related best practices, remember that custom fields should not contain personal and sensitive data.

Flight

For the past several months, Amadeus customers have been experiencing issues with booking Air France Abonnement fares in Concur Travel. Previously, Concur Travel supported Abonnement fares properly with information provided from Amadeus, as they were offered under specific booking codes (RBDs). If a user had an Abonnement card stored in their SAP Concur profile and was using the View More Fares feature, Concur Travel sent an RBD-specific pricing request along with the Abonnement card information to Amadeus to obtain an Abonnement fare.

Air France has expanded their Abonnement fare offering by removing the RBD limitation and introducing a requirement to use GDS passenger type codes to obtain Abonnement fares. There are three possible passenger type codes that can apply, depending on the type of Abonnement card the user has. A validation tool is available in the GDS to confirm which passenger type code applies for the user's card, but to date, the validation tool has been unavailable to Concur Travel for clients using Amadeus.

Amadeus has now provided Concur Travel with a validation mechanism in order to restore access to Abonnement fares and SAP Concur is actively testing this validation process with the existing booking workflow. Once SAP Concur has confirmed that this process can be added to the existing booking workflow, that work will be scheduled immediately. SAP Concur cannot yet provide a timeline for resolution but more information will be available over the next two to three weeks. Additional communications will be provided as updates occur.

SAP Concur is pleased to announce support for Braathens Regional for Amadeus flex faring in the Nordic countries. The new information is available in the Concur Travel: Flex Faring Travel Service Guide.

Profile

With the April 2015 release, SAP Concur updated the profile page to allow for further definition of user seat preferences. We expanded the preference options to support selection of a middle seat preference, as it may be needed for companion bookings.

SAP Concur has received reports from Worldspan customers that this option was causing profile save errors when selected, due to Worldspan not supporting this value. Although SAP Concur could save the profile to the SAP Concur database, it could not save the changes to the Worldspan profile.

With this release, SAP Concur has updated the profile page to prompt users to update their seat preference selection. Essentially, no user will be able to select the middle seat preference in their Concur Travel profile, and if the middle preference is already selected, they will be prompted to select a different option.

SAP Concur will make changes to remove the middle seat option from the Seat Preference dropdown for Worldspan customers with a future release.

Miscellaneous

Concur Open and Personalised Concur Open users can subscribe to email notifications about the SAP Concur products they use. As part of the subscription process, SAP Concur sends a verification email to the user. The user must click Verify in that email in order to receive the notifications. It appears that some users are not completing the verification step, so SAP Concur has added a reminder to the subscription page.

In an effort to ensure the ongoing security of our products and services, SAP Concur has issued a new concursolutions.com SSL certificate. The current certificate will expire on 16 March 2019.

Any customer who has pinned this expiring certificate will need to update to the new certificate prior to 16 March 2019. If the pinned certificate is not updated prior to 16 March 2019, your organisation and users will experience disruption to SAP Concur products and services.

Customers who have not pinned the certificate do not need to take any action as the new certificate is updated automatically. Most customers do not pin the certificate.

Please consult your IT department to check whether this applies to you.

The new SSL certificate can be accessed here: http://assets.concur.com/concurtraining/cte/en-us/concursolutions.cert.pem

SAP Concur is transitioning to a new email infrastructure for outbound email from our services to SAP Concur users. Because of this, companies who filter inbound email based on the sending IP address must add new IP addresses to their Safe Sender list to ensure that their users receive email from SAP Concur.

Initially, the issue described here affected only companies that use Concur Expense. Starting in January, email from other SAP Concur services (such as Travel and Concur Pay) will move to the new email infrastructure. We will continue to add other services throughout the first quarter of 2019. Please monitor the release notes for more information about the timing of the additional changes.

The new IP addresses are not published publicly but they are available by contacting SAP Concur support. If you use Concur Expense and if your company filters incoming email based on IP address, please work with your email server management team to ensure any required Safe Sender lists for IP addresses are updated so that your users continue to receive SAP Concur email without interruptions.

SAP Concur has provided a release note about the updated email notifications for several months. Be aware that we will discontinue this release note after this month.

Profile

Concur Travel is currently in the process of rescheduling the sunset/retirement of XML Profile Sync. With the April release, this item will be removed from the release notes. When this project is closer to completion, information will appear again in the release notes.

SAP Concur is planning to increase the security of the Travel Profile Services by modifying the event notification sent to travel suppliers for the following changes: Form of Payment, User (Travel Profile) and Itinerary

The new notifications will be modified to remove all tokens from the notification. The travel suppliers and TMCs who subscribe to these notifications will begin to get the updated notifications in a future release. SAP Concur will contact the affected travel suppliers and TMCs to help them migrate to the new notification format.

Miscellaneous

As part of our ongoing commitment to e-receipts and the effortless expense claim, air e-receipts generated by SAP Concur based on ticket and coupon data from GDS and some TripLink transactions are getting a new look.

When using the Concur Travel & Expense employee import, the password field in the 100, 300, 305 and 310 record sets will no longer be used to update or bulk reset user passwords. SAP Concur will change the functionality in imports such that the password field is only used when a user account is created. The field will no longer be used to update or bulk reset user passwords. The update and replace password features on the 100 record will no longer be used.

SAP Concur will have a new Forgot Password feature added to the SAP Concur Sign In page, providing an updated login experience for users who log in with user name and password credentials.

When the new Forgot Password feature is released (targeted for 11 May), the following existing Forgot Password page functionality will be deprecated:

• Security Questions: Users will no longer receive security question prompts for login authentication.

• On-page text: Company custom text will no longer display.

• Password hints: The Send me an email with my password hint option will no longer be available.

Composite login functionality allows users to use a login ID that does not include a domain to log in to SAP Concur products.

All users who use only their username (ex: johndoe) to log in will need to use their CTE Login Name rather than their login ID to log in to SAP Concur products.

SAP Concur will no longer support composite login sign-in page URLs. The typical URL for a composite login page includes the name of the entity (ex: entity=pxxxxxxxxx) and looks like this: https://www.concursolutions.com/signin.asp?entity=pxxxxxxxxx.

All clients will be using the standard Sign In page to access SAP Concur products. The standard sign in page is https://www.concursolutions.com/nui/signin.

Deprecation of the composite login pages for www.concursolutions.com is targeted for 11 May 2019.

Single Sign-On allows users to access multiple applications using one set of login credentials. Currently, SAP Concur has two methods for signing in: with a user name and password or using SSO with identity provider (IdP) credentials, such as a user's login credentials for their organisation.

SAP Concur is planning to add a Manage Single Sign-On (SSO) feature to Concur Travel that provides clients with a self-service option for setting up SSO for their organisation. SSO is currently supported for Concur Expense, Invoice, Request and Travel.

SAP Concur is planning to add a new Sign In page, providing an updated login experience for users who log in with a user name and password credentials. Current Single Sign-On (SSO) users will log in without having to enter additional credentials. This feature is planned for 2019. This feature provides better security and a faster, convenient experience for users logging in to SAP Concur products and services.