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.

With this release, Concur Travel has updated the Aircraft Code List to include the Boeing 737 MAX 8 and the Boeing 737 MAX 9. These options can be used to create specific rules around these aircraft.

Flight

SAP Concur is always looking for ways to better serve travellers and travel programme managers. As announced in March as a planned feature update, a new feature called Dual Fare Display will aid users and arrangers in viewing and deciding on which branded fare content is best. The Dual Fare Display feature updates the air search page (search by price) to show the two lowest bookable branded fares, side by side.

With the April release, Dual Fare Display is auto-enabled by default for all Sabre customers.

With this release, we have updated the text displayed to the user when an error message is returned from Cleartrip. Prior to this, the error message shown in Concur Travel asked the traveller/arranger to retry booking. This was based on our understanding that an error message from Cleartrip meant the ticket attempt failed.

We have since discovered that – in certain cases – the booking is successful with Cleartrip, but they have challenges sending the confirmation information back to Concur Travel because of time out or other errors. Based on this, we have updated the error message to state the following:

“Sorry, there was a problem with your booking. Do not try to rebook. Please contact your travel agency.

Detail message: Cleartrip was unable to process the booking.”

Airlines are GST (Goods and Services Tax) registered businesses and must provide GST-compliant invoices to their clients for sale of services in the India market. The invoice must contain the customer and taxpayer GSTIN (Goods and Services Tax Identification Number) and billing address, and it must be sent to the company's or entity's registered email address.

Information about GST has been added to the Cleartrip (Air) Direct Connect Travel Service Guide.

Based on feedback from Express Checkout Early Adopters programme, with this release, we have changed the user experience for landing on the confirmation page.

We moved the traveller name, traveller loyalty and TSA/redress number – along with seats associated with the booking – to the newly named Travellers section. This makes the "confirmed" section cleaner and ensures the user/arranger is informed that the trip is confirmed.

Train

With this release, Concur Travel upgrades the RIVA Interface version for SNCF from v31 to v33. There are no functional changes introduced with this upgrade.

With the new fare structure that will be launched on 9 May 2019, SNCF has introduced new types of Advantage programmes: Carte Liberté (valid on first class and second class), Carte Avantage Jeune, Carte Avantage Week-End, Carte Avantage Senior and Carte Avantage Famille

Miscellaneous

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. 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.

Administration

Customers will need to access SAP Concur products and services via the following domains: *.concursolutions.com and *.concurcdc.cn

This change is targeted for 8 June 2019. SAP Concur recommends clients migrate to one of the domains at their earliest convenience, if they are not already using one of them. Please contact appsec@sap.com for any questions regarding this change.

Profile

Concur Travel is currently in the process of evaluating this change. With the May 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.

Meetings

As part of SAP Concur’s ongoing commitment to keeping customer data secure, meeting attendees arriving from third-party registration tools will be required to authenticate before booking their travel to the event.

Users will be redirected either to their company-configured SSO provider or the Concur Travel sign in page. Upon successful authentication, the user will be brought to the usual landing page for a meetings booking.

Miscellaneous

Concur Travel once offered support for the Amadeus Interface Record (AIR) process for Amadeus customers. Many years ago, SAP Concur advised customers that this was no longer a recommended method for synchronising PNRs between Concur Travel and Amadeus but did not officially retire the integration.

Based on Amadeus and SAP Concur monitoring, there have been no records transmitted using AIR in recent months.

SAP Concur is now targeting the May release for official retirement of this integration.

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.

Authentication

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.

In a future release, SAP Concur will add a new Forgot Password feature to the SAP Concur Sign In page, providing an updated experience for users who log in with user name and password credentials. This change does not affect customers that use SSO to log in to SAP Concur.

Currently, depending on a company's configuration, there may be several other options available for the forgotten password process. When the new Forgot Password feature becomes available (targeted for 11 May), those additional options will be removed. They include (if configured for your company): security questions, custom text on the password page and password hints.

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.