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 clients 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 clients 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.

• Clients 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.

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.

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.

Concur APIs

A new version of the List API is available. The List v4 API enables 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 can 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 can be performed with a User or Company access token, providing the opportunity to apply the principle of least privilege.

Custom Fields

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.

File Transfer Updates

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

SAP Concur will begin 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 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.

Financial Integration

The Financial Integration Service (FIS) allows an external system to interact with financial documents generated from SAP Concur, for financial postings into their financial system.

This service provides an automated solution to request available data objects such as approved expense claims, cash advances and invoices. The objects can be imported to the client internal ERP, and then the integration can send posting confirmation back into Concur Expense and/or Concur Invoice.

The Financial Integration Service works with custom connectors, applications from the SAP Concur App Centre, and client-built integrations.

For more information, refer to the Shared: Financial Integration Service Setup Guide.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: With FIS there are several benefits:

• A complete end-to-end workflow of the expense claim and spend visibility between SAP Concur and ERP.

• The client ERP can now send posting feedback to SAP Concur via bi-directional communication.

• Posting feedback is captured in SAP Concur where claims can be either modified or sent back to employee for correction, and reposted to the ERP.

• Improved accuracy and synchronisation between systems.

• No more overnight processing as this process provides the client with near real-time posting and feedback.

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.

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

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 clients 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 clients, 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.

Concur Invoice

In a future release, clients will be able to export data by clicking the Download as Excel link in the All Sent to Purchasing list view on the My Invoices page.

There is no maximum number of items that can be exported, but the export process might take some time if there are many items to be exported.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This feature provides clients with flexibility in how they work with invoice data.