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.

Administration

Custom fields that are connected lists can now be added to the Expense Attendee forms in Forms and Fields (Administration > Expense > Expense Admin > Forms and Fields). The Expense Attendee forms are used to configure the attendee forms for Concur Expense, Concur Request and Concur Invoice.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This update enhances the attendee functionality to allow connected list type custom fields.

APIs

A new version of the List API is available. The List v4 API allows you to view your configured lists and create new lists within SAP Concur products.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: The List v4 API uses more secure and modern, fine-grained methods. This API uses Universal Unique Identifiers (UUIDs) and uses JSON instead of XML. Also, authentication to the List v4 API may be performed with a User or Company access token, providing the opportunity to apply the principle of least privilege.

A new version of the List Item API is available. The List Item v4 API provides solutions to retrieve and manage list items.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: The List Item v4 API uses more secure and modern, fine-grained methods. This API uses Universal Unique Identifiers (UUIDs) and uses JSON instead of XML. Also, authentication to the List Item v4 API may be performed with a User or Company access token, providing the opportunity to apply the principle of least privilege.

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 setup 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.

Authentication Administration

On 8 December 2020, SAP Concur released a new Company Request Token self-service tool that enables clients to generate the Company Request Token that is required to request a JSON Web Token (JWT) when connecting to APIs in the SAP Concur platform.

Requirements for generating a Company Request Token:

• The client must obtain a link to the new tool from SAP Concur Client Web Services (CWS).
• The client must obtain a Client ID from CWS.
• A company admin must have the Web Services Administrator permission to access the Company Request Token self-service tool through the provided link.
• For a request token to be issued, the Client ID (App ID) must be allowed to connect to the company.

Requirements for obtaining a JWT:

• The Client ID provided by SAP Concur CWS
• The client secret provided by SAP Concur CWS
• The Company UUID generated by the Company Request Token tool
• The Company Request Token generated by the Company Request Token tool

An admin with the Web Services Administrator permission can navigate to the Company Request Tokens page through the link provided by CWS, enter the Client ID they obtained from CWS into the App ID field, and then click Submit to generate a Company Request Token. They will also be able to generate a replacement token if one is needed.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: The new self-service tool enables an admin with the required permissions to generate a Company Request Token without relying on SAP Concur internal staff. The new tool also enables the admin to generate a replacement Company Request Token without assistance from SAP Concur support if their Company Request Token expires or is lost.

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.

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 is maintaining our SAP Concur file transfer subsystem to provide greater security for those file transfers.

SAP will begin migrating SAP Concur 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 the end of 2020. 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.

Release Notes

Starting with the January 2021 release, SAP Concur Technical Publications will no longer publish the preview release notes. This change is being made to streamline our client communication. With this change, only two sets of release notes will be published for each monthly release cycle: draft release notes and final release notes.

The 2021 Release Calendar (English Only) will be updated to reflect this change.

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

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 01 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.

Security

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

In early October, the SAP Concur networking team noted that their configuration of the Content Delivery System had been blocking the protocols in the list that follows for some time.

As such, the notice to customers that we would be making a change to our F5 Client SSL profile was superfluous, as those aspects of the existing profile were not actually available. SAP Concur made changes to the F5 Client SSL profile on 7 October as well, in the interest of maintaining a strong security profile.

This means that there was no new effect for customers, as the following protocols had already been blocked previously:

• SSL v2
• SSL v3
• TLS v1.0
• TLS v1.1
• 3DES cipher suite

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This update provides ongoing security for our products and services.

User Interface

Instances of Country or Countries on the user interface are being updated to Country/Region and Countries/Regions, respectively.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change provides a better global user experience.

Administration

With the November 2020 release, the Auto-Create Claim setting was added to the New Request Policy and Modify Request Policy pages (Administration > Request > Request Policies) for all Concur Request policies.

It was decided the Auto-Create Claim setting needs additional improvements before the setting is available to clients. The Auto-Create Claim setting will be temporarily removed from the New Request Policy and Modify Request Policy pages.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This update supports improvements to the setting functionality.

Attendees

These changes are also part of the NextGen UI experience.

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

Currently, searching for employee attendees can prove difficult as there may be no fields available to search by other than first name and last name.

With this update, the default advanced search view for employee attendees will automatically include 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.