If you are not familiar with microservices, this may be the blog post for you.
People use email today more than ever and that does not seem to be slowing down. So why should you have to stop using Outlook in order to log into Concur and enter in an expense?
If you are in IT and are familiar with Slack, why should you stop using Slack in order to log into Concur and enter an expense?
What if the technologies that you use the most have embedded functionality in them that allow you to do your day job and get your expenses done at the same time?
That is exactly what the guys at Concur Labs have set out to do. Their mission is to extend the functionality of Concur into technology that you are already familiar with like Outlook, Slack, Amazon Alexa and more. The functionalities are in Beta but can be used now.
With Microsoft Outlook, the user can simply grab the add-in from Outlook.
Once authenticated, a receipt from the user’s inbox will automatically be captured and he/she simply selects "send to Concur" in order to have the receipt as an attachment and the line item details captured.
There is no need to forward the email or take a screenshot. It immediately goes into the user’s account.
Slack is a tool for co-workers to collaborate on projects internally. Users can share insight, attach files and more. Concur labs has built bot functionality into Slack so that a user simply can type in a command and Concur will take the command and create either an expense line item, expense report or display a travel itinerary.
Dragging a receipt image onto the interface will kick off the Slack bot to start grabbing the pertinent details off of the receipt.
Selecting save will then either add the expense to the user’s available expenses or add the expense to an open report.
The benefit is that the user experiences pieces of functionality of Concur without having to be logged into Concur directly.
The vision of Concur is to delight the traveler so that there is a frictionless experience inside of Concur and within other applications.
For more information, please go to www.concurlabs.com to learn about the above two microservices and other things the Labs team is cooking up.
