Attendees

These changes are also part of the NextGen UI experience. The production deployment of this change will be conducted in phases over the next few weeks. Individual customers will start seeing this change between 15 January and 30 January. Production deployment to the EMEA datacentre has already been completed. The production deployment to the US and China datacentres is still planned.

Users searching for employees to add as attendees to an expected expense now have additional filter options that can be used to narrow search results, helping make the identification of employees accurate and efficient.

Searching for employee attendees has proven difficult as there may have been no fields available to search by other than first name and last name.

With this update, the default advanced search view for employee attendees automatically includes the addition of email addresses and country filters.

This feature update includes the following benefits:

• Accurate identification of employees, particularly for those with the same first and last name

• Improved efficiency for employee searches by providing filters that help narrow relevant search results

• Simplified employee attendee management, eliminating the need to use an attendee import to update attendee data for the SYSEMP attendee type

• Optional inclusion of inactive employees in attendee searches

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This update helps make searching for employee attendees more efficient and also simplifies the management of employee attendees by removing the need to use an attendee import to update the attendee data of the SYSEMP attendee type.

Authentication

These changes are part of the SAP Concur continued commitment to maintaining secure authentication.

Support for the Director SAML service is being deprecated. Travel Management Companies (TMCs) and SAP Concur personnel will soon begin assisting customers who currently use Director SAML to migrate to SAP Concur SAML v2 SSO (SAML v2).

Clients currently using Director SAML are encouraged to migrate to SAML V2 as soon as possible.

Deprecation of support for the Director SAML service is dependent on the following requirements:

• SAP Concur technicians and TMCs assist existing SAP Concur clients to migrate from the Director SAML service to SAML V2.

• All clients that currently rely on the Director SAML service have migrated from Director SAML to SAML V2.

Migration from Director SAML to SAML V2 requires the following general steps:

• The client identifies an admin to act as the SSO admin and assigns the proper permission/role.

• The SSO admin coordinates with their SAP Concur technician to obtain the SAP Concur SP metadata.

• The SSO admin configures the SSO settings at the IdP based on information from SP metadata.

• The SSO admin retrieves IdP metadata from the IdP and delivers the metadata to the SAP Concur technician.

• The SSO admin adds a few testing users and tests the new SSO connection.

• With successful testing, the company rolls out SSO to their SAP Concur users.

For more information about the Single Sign-On self-service option, refer to the Shared: Single Sign-On Overview (English Only) and the Shared: Single Sign-On Setup Guide (English Only).

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change provides better security and improved support for users logging in to SAP Concur products and services.

These changes are part of the SAP Concur continued commitment to maintaining secure authentication.

SAP Concur support for Hash-Based Message Authentication Code (HMAC) is being deprecated. Travel Management Companies (TMCs) and SAP Concur personnel are currently assisting customers who use HMAC to migrate to SAP Concur SAML v2 SSO (SAML v2).

SAP Concur provides a Single Sign-On self-service option that enables client admins to set up their SAML v2 connections without involving an SAP Concur support representative.

For more information about the Single Sign-On self-service option, refer to the Shared: Single Sign-On Overview (English Only) and the Shared: Single Sign-On Setup Guide (English Only).

The HMAC deprecation includes two phases:

PHASE I:

• Clients must have an identity provider (IdP) or a custom SAML 2.0 compliant solution.

• Clients begin testing authentication using SAML v2.

• TMCs prepare to onboard new SAP Concur clients to SAML v2.

• Customers will be notified via release notes about the official deprecation date of HMAC. As of the official deprecation date, no new clients can be onboarded using HMAC; new clients must be onboarded to SAML v2.

• Existing clients using HMAC must migrate to SAML v2.

PHASE II:

• TMCs have migrated all existing SAP Concur clients from the HMAC service to SAML v2.

• The HMAC service is deprecated. Phase II is targeted to end mid-year in 2021.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change provides better security and improved support for users logging in to SAP Concur products and services.

Authorised Support Contacts

SAP Concur has added an option to the SAP Concur support portal that enables Authorised Support Contacts (ASCs) to designate whether they should be contacted regarding a security or data protection topic.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This enhancement gives clients more control over who in their company is contacted regarding security or data protection topics, and provides greater control over which notifications an ASC receives.

File Transfer Updates

This Release Note is intended for the technical staff responsible for file transmissions with SAP Concur. For our customers and suppliers participating in data exchange, SAP Concur is maintaining our file transfer subsystem to provide greater security for those file transfers.

SAP Concur is in the process of migrating entities that currently use a legacy process for moving files to a more efficient and secure file routing process that relies on APIs.

Clients whose entities are currently configured to use the legacy process will be migrated to the more efficient process sometime between now and 31 July 2021. After they are migrated to the more efficient process, clients will see the following improvement:

• With the legacy process, clients had to wait for the file move schedule to run at a specified time. With the more efficient and secure API-based process, extracts and other outbound files from SAP Concur will be available within the existing overnight processing period shortly after the files are created.

This announcement pertains to the following file transfer DNS endpoints:

• st.concursolutions.com

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: These changes provide greater security and efficiency for file transfers.

Files transferred to SAP Concur solutions must be encrypted with the SAP Concur public PGP key, concursolutionsrotate.asc.

concursolutionsrotate.asc

• Key file is available in client’s root folder

• Key ID 40AC5D35

• RSA 4096-bit signing and encryption subkey

• Key expires every 2 years

• Client is responsible for replacing the key before it expires

  • Next expiry date: 4 September 2022

  • SAP Concur plans to replace the current rotating public PGP key in the client’s root folder 90 days before the expiration date

The SAP Concur legacy PGP key (key ID D4D727C0) remains supported for existing clients but will be deprecated in the future.

SAP Concur strongly recommends that clients use the more secure rotating public PGP key for file transfers. To facilitate the use of the more secure rotating public PGP key for file transfers, SAP Concur added the key to existing client’s home folders on Friday 15 January 2021.

This announcement pertains to the following file transfer DNS endpoints:

• st.concursolutions.com

• mft-us.concursolutions.com

• vs.concursolutions.com

• st-eu.concursolutions.com

• mft-eu.concursolutions.com

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: The rotating public PGP key provides greater security for file transfers.

NextGen UI for Concur Request

The continued evolution of the Concur Request solution user interface experience is the result of thoughtful design and research that provides a modern, intuitive and streamlined experience for the request process.

Concur Request customers will have the ability to preview and then opt in to the NextGen UI before the mandatory move.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: The result is the next generation of the Concur Request user interface designed to provide a modern, consistent and streamlined user experience. This technology not only provides an enhanced user interface, but also allows us to react more quickly to customer requests to meet changing needs as they happen.

Release Notes

SAP Concur Technical Publications no longer publish the preview release notes. This change was made to streamline our client communication. With this change, only two sets of release notes are published for each monthly release cycle: draft release notes and final release notes.

The 2021 Release Calendar (English Only) has been updated to reflect this change.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change simplifies the release notes communications.

For more information about the publishing dates for the draft and final release notes, refer to the 2021 Release Calendar (English Only).

SAP Concur Platform

SAP will be retiring the existing Concur Request APIs (v1.0, v3.0 and v3.1) in a future release (targeted to begin 1 June 2021), in accordance with the SAP Concur API Lifecycle & Deprecation Policy. These APIs are replaced by the Concur Request v4 APIs. SAP will no longer support these APIs after retirement.

Decommissioning of the v1.0, v3.0 and v3.1 APIs will start three months after retiring the APIs. The specific dates for decommissioning are dependent on the individual client's API migration.

API Timeline for v1.0, v3.0, v3.1:

• Deprecation – 1 March, 2020 – 31 May, 2021

• Retirement – 1 June, 2021 – 30 November, 2021

• Decommission – starts after 3 months of inactivity at the retired state

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: The Concur Request APIs v1.0, v3.0 and v3.1 only support the previous authentication method, which is not best security practice and does not meet the Oauth2 standards. In addition, the previous versions of the Concur Request APIs provided limited possibilities for moving a Request through the approval workflow, as well as managing custom simple & connected list fields. These issues are resolved with the new Concur Request v4 APIs.

In addition, SAP has run a backward compatibility project between the current Concur Request APIs and the new Concur Request v4 APIs (not ISO-compatibility) in order to have the vast majority of use cases managed in the previous versions also be managed in the Concur Request v4 APIs.

There are no planned changes this month.