Name: Introducing SAP Concur Platform Integration
Uploaded: 2023-12-4
Duration: 522 s

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<div><p>In this video series, by Tahir Hussain Babar (Bob) from the SAP HANA Academy and Venkatesh Babu from SAP Concur Cloud Channel Sales, we will show you how to get started with various data integration aspects, by looking at authentication and authorization, when using SAP Concur APIs. This first video starts with an overview of SAP Concur, the main aspects of the video series and gives an introduction into SAP Concur Platform Integration.</p></div>

Introducing SAP Concur Platform Integration

Welcome to the SAP HANA Academy. My name is Bob, and in this playlist we will be looking at developing SAP Conquer extension solutions. In this mini video series we will be looking at an overview and how we authenticate when we are using the APIs. In this video we're going to go through an overview of the first series. As a quick overview of Concur, as you can imagine Concur is about travel and expenses. So how you can file your expenses after which they get approved and then how it can roll over to accounting systems. So you can gain visibility to spend anywhere, anytime to cut costs, which will ultimately make you more efficient, and it will also drive compliance across your organization. Now, there's three different areas within Concur. You can submit and approve your expenses on the go. Also, there's an area where you can book and organize travel. And lastly, you can organize your invoices, so you can perform electronic invoice capture. And as you can imagine, each of these different areas has different products associated with them, such as Concur Expense, Concur Travel and Concur Invoice. So what are we going to do in this mini-series? Well, we're going to be looking at Concur Platform Integration. Essentially what we'll be doing is looking at how you can write and read to SAP Concur but using web services or APIs. As you can imagine there's a huge amount of partners who've created applications which are built on top of SAP Concur. Now in terms of platform integration, of course you can inject or extract data through FTP, but again we're going to be looking specifically at using web service APIs. The focus in this mini-series is whether or not you've got admin access to a production sandbox environment. So we're going to be looking at authentication administration, which means we'll be able to create an app. But again, if you don't have admin access, we'll be looking at other ways in which you can get your credentials in order to use those APIs. What you'll ultimately end up with is a client or application ID and the password for that application, which is called a client secret, as well as authentication. Today, we're going to be looking at authentication, and we'll do this by allocating scopes and grant types to your application, which will ultimately determine which APIs you can access. And this will work for customers who have admin access on a sandbox. But we're also going to discuss what happens if you don't have admin access on a sandbox. So when we've discussed authentication and authorization, and how you've obtained your credentials. What we'll then look at is using OAuth 2.0 authentication with Postman. Whether that OAuth 2.0 authentication was user generated by someone who has admin access, or whether it was created by the company for people who don't have admin access. And we'll look at creating refresh tokens, bearer tokens and storing this information along with geolocation information. In the last video, we'll also look at obtaining your request token for those people who don't have admin access. The next video will then be looking at testing your authorisation and authentication. And what we're simply going to do is retrieve the users in our SAP Concur sandbox. So we can test reading from SAP Concur. And then what we're going to do is create a user within SAP Concur within that sandbox. Again, just to test that we can write to SAP Concur. The final video is then going to cover the concept of deep links. Deep links is the formal way of connecting to a partner app by the customer on SAP Concur's App Store. So in terms of the architecture, as you can imagine, a customer will have their own repository of data. HR data, financial data, and of course reporting data. All of this would be within a customer network, but it's unusual to have all your data in one place. So you might want to integrate that data using different types of middleware, API tools or other platforms. Examples of this integration could be swapping employee data or client data and also logging that data back to your customer system via a journal. Of course we'll be covering SAP Concur integration. So we'll be looking at one of the ways in which you can integrate that data and of course again we're going to be using APIs to pull and push the data between SAP Concur and your customer's repository of information. So what's the formal process to perform SAP Concur platform integration? Well, as you'd imagine, the partner will initially engage with SAP Concur to develop a Concur extension solution. What will happen next is that after the partners business use case has passed the SAP Concur business development vetting and contracting process for an App Center partnership, technical certification will occur and it consists of four stages. The first step is that SAP Concur will set up a sandbox. They'll also register a development application and App Center listing. From that App Center listing, they'll be able to access their various credentials to use the APIs. So then what will happen is the partner will develop extension solutions and partner side connection flows to SAP Concur using again OAuth2 authentication. The next stage is for the partner to test their application end to end including logging. And we'll demonstrate this in this miniseries by simply retrieving all the users within SAP Concur and then creating a very simple profile of a user to test that we can write to SAP Concur. The last step is for SAP Concur and the partner to perform post-development testing. SAP Concur will then certify the solution and help the partner go live on SAP Concur's App Center so that they can move into production. Now when developing these SAP Concur platform solutions we tend to get asked the same questions again and again. So in the next slide I'm going to cover a few of the frequently asked questions. The first FAQ is we would like to develop an app for each customer using the customer's technical ecosystem, i.e. a server. Well, the response to that would be that SAP Concur requires partners to provide a single app, deployed on a single server and used by several customers. Another question would be, we provide a mobile app and we would like each mobile phone to connect to your APIs. So, SAP Concur does not accept connections from each mobile phone, but only centralized connections coming from a single server. Next, a question we get asked commonly is, can SAP Concur host the partner app? Well, the partner app hosting is the responsibility of the partner. SAP Concur will not provide any hosting services. You can host your app on your own servers or use a hyperscaler. Lastly, can SAP Concur use the partners own APIs and the App Center program only offers SAP Concur standard APIs to our partners. So in the next video, which will serve as the second video in this five video series, what we're going to cover is logging into a sandbox, assuming you've got administration access and creating your application in order to obtain your credentials. We hope you enjoy the mini-series. Don't forget to subscribe and thanks for watching.