Request

Concur Open is the SAP Concur near-real-time service status dashboard, which displays known and widespread outages and incidents for select SAP Concur services and all data centres. Concur Open displays the current service status as well as incident history for the past 20 days.

Targeted for the end of July, there will be new functionality added to Concur Open. Users can continue to access Concur Open and view Concur service availability; no functionality will be removed. However, with the release, SAP Concur users will be able to log in to Concur Open and:

• View service status for the services and the data centre that are specific to their company
• Access subscription options for updates about the incidents that affect the services specific to their company
• View service history for the past two years as well as detailed root cause analysis information and the actions taken by SAP Concur for specific incidents

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: Customers use Concur Open to monitor their SAP Concur services outages, status and availability. Adding this new functionality will provide customers with a personalised view of their service status and availability. SAP Concur's goal is to provide a more accurate and transparent view of incidents/outages.

The Processor Privacy Statement link is available in the SAP Concur footer.

However, not all pages in SAP Concur display the footer. In this case, the user can return to the Home page and click the Processor Privacy Statement link there.

Also with this release, the Processor Privacy Statement link is available in online Help.

SAP Concur Platform

SAP Concur is upgrading the servers that support the SAP Concur Platform Callouts. This maintenance includes the Production Proxy Migration (North America Data Centre only) and PWS Server Migration to VM (EMEA and North American Data Centres only). The PWS Server Migration to VM was completed on 2 May, 2018. The Production Proxy Migration began on 9 May 2018, and will be completed on 3 August 2018.

These servers support the following functionality:

• Fetch Attendee Data Callout
• Fetch List Item Callout
• Event Notification Callout
• Launch External URL Callout
• Concur Salesforce Connector

Be aware that this maintenance means that for any customer callout URLs, SAP Concur has the following requirements:

• The endpoint is secured with SSL/TLS.
• The endpoint uses a minimum of TLS 1.0, but TLS 1.2 is preferred.
• The endpoint must employ Diffie-Hellman cipher suites with key sizes >1024 bits.
• Due to the ever-evolving world of SSL and standards, we do not publish a specific list of permitted cipher suites, but we generally advise that a modern industry supported list is utilised.
• The endpoint must present an SSL certificate with a chain to a valid root that can be verified. If the chain cannot be verified without installing additional certificates, the calls from SAP Concur will fail.
• Clients who whitelist access for Concur callout traffic from the North America Data Centre (not common) may need to update their access control list (ACL) to IP 12.129.29.86.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This maintenance will mitigate the out-of-warranty issue with our current hardware.

Concur Request APIs v4.0 are now available.

With v4.0, Concur has made great enhancements in the existing Request endpoints and now provides the ability for a client and/or a partner to interact with Concur Request to do the following:

• Get the detailed information about existing authorisation requests
• Create, Read, Update or Delete an existing request
• Move an existing request through the approval flow with one of the following available actions: Submit, Approve, Recall, Cancel, Close or Reopen
• Get the list of expected expenses (including trip segments) in a request
• Create, Read, Update or Delete an expected expense for a request
• Get information of a travel agency office

Concur has also enhanced the user experience for list management data, and now supports simple and connected list data for the Create, Read and Update Request APIs in the request header and request entries.

Background: SAP is continuing to invest heavily in APIs and tools to simplify end-to-end integration.

At SAP Concur, we strongly believe that an open ecosystem expands your view. An open ecosystem dynamically connects your internal systems, spend and partner data to reveal powerful insights that empower you to run your business better.

Explore the capabilities listed in the Overview section and consider how the APIs could help you simplify some of your existing processes, such as:

• Automatically creating a Concur Travel Request for any off-site training approved through your Human Resources system
• Exposing authorisation requests pending approvals onto your internal corporate portal “Manager” widget

We are also planning on adding additional API capabilities in a future release.

Permissions: In addition to the existing user-level permissions, the Concur Request APIs v4.0, which are based on the most recent Authentication service and Concur’s new Oauth2 framework, will manage the authorisation for company-level permissions. Clients and/or partners can now use a single token/permission to interact with Request on behalf of all company users.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: These enhancements will provide more options and abilities for developers using Concur's Platform with Request.

Planned Changes

The items in this section are targeted for future releases. Concur reserves the right to postpone implementation of – or completely remove – any enhancement/change mentioned here.

SAP Concur announced the End of Support for plain text FTP to transfer data to and from SAP Concur.

Plain text FTP is not a secured protocol and has inherent security vulnerabilities. On 1 September, 2018, SAP Concur Operations will apply a security update to our File Transfer infrastructure, restricting the use of plain text FTP as a part of our ongoing commitment to securing our customers’ data and meeting the audited security requirements of the SAP Concur Trust Platform.

For more information, refer to the Plain Text FTP Retirement FAQ.

What This Means – The Client Experience: After 1 September, 2018, uploads of file types such as Employee, List, Attendee and other Import files, as well as downloads of SAE and other Extract files that use Plain Text FTP, will not be accepted via SAP Concur’s Filemover system. This will significantly impact client usage of SAP Concur products such as Concur Travel, Concur Expense and Concur Invoice, as well as integration activities to customers’ financial systems. There will be no exceptions beyond 1 September, 2018.

Client Notifications

The list of non-affiliated subprocessors is available here: SAP Concur list of Subprocessors (English Only)

Monthly browser certifications, both current and planned, are available with the other SAP Concur monthly release notes, accessible from What's New - Professional Edition