Today we are proud to announce the General Availability of FileWave 16.2.1. If your server is hosted you will soon receive an email about the upgrade schedule. For those who had Early Access for 16.2.0 on a hosted server you will also receive an email about moving to 16.2.1. Thank you to everyone who participated in Early Access. The primary reason for the 16.2.1 update from 16.2.0 is OpenSSL 3.5.4, Qt 6.9.3, and Redis 8.0.4 updates, but there was also one performance improvement as well as four small fixes.
FileWave 16.2 includes powerful new features designed to simplify administration, strengthen security, and streamline endpoint operations at scale. This release introduces the new Admin Notification Channel, delivering real-time alerts for model updates, client enrollments, new releases, expiring certificates, and more...ensuring administrators stay aware of meaningful events.
Expanded Apple platform support brings Apple macOS and iPadOS 26 support and granular Apple profile controls, while new onboarding smart groups make device enrollment more efficient and timely, regardless of platform.
In version 16.2, organizations benefit from even more OS patching improvements, which include FileWave Policies for automated patching, obsolete patch cleanup, and automation rules for Fileset creation. This update also delivers a simplified Central UI, expanded language support, and new Windows Imaging Performance Evaluation tools, further solidifying FileWave’s role as a comprehensive, modern endpoint management solution built for today’s complex environments.
See these new features in action: FileWave Alliance Livestream Event Q3/2025
FileWave adds new features and enhancements all of the time, but we are especially excited about the changes in the new FileWave Admin Notification channel will create for FileWave Administrators now and in the future. It's a brand new way for FileWave Anywhere and Central to tell you "what's going on". In this first iteration you are going to get notifications for model updates, new clients awaiting enrollments, certificate expiry, new releases, etc. But as we move forward we expect this engine to grow to show you information about all of the meaningful events ongoing in the FileWave ecosystem. It is like a real-time audit log, but only showing you meaningful information. We think you are going to love it!
Of course version 16.2 of FileWave supports macOS and iPadOS 26 and the changes included this fall from Apple. And we don't want to undersell those changes, but we also didn't stop there! In FileWave 16.2 we have added the concept of granular configuration profiles. You now no longer need to set all settings in a payload, but rather can just change one setting leaving everything else unchanged. We see this as primarily useful for restriction profiles, and have implemented the solution there first, but more profile types will be supported soon! We think this will be a radical improvement for your ability to manage your Apple devices with greater control options.
FileWave has long supported IdP integration for administrator login and device enrollment. But now you can also synchronize IdP data fields into FileWave in a one-way sync similar our LDAP synchronization functionality. This feature makes it simple to include user attributes such as name and email into FileWave for use as variables in content for your devices such as configuration profiles for things like email and VPN setup.
We love our smart groups, and always have! They are robust, incredibly powerful and flexible! But they aren't fast, until now. Smart groups by default re-evaluate every 10 minutes. This is great for normal workflows, but when you are enrolling a new device and waiting for content to install, 10 minutes feels like an eternity. So, by popular demand, we have added the concept of "fast" or "onboarding" smart groups. You can have up to 3 of these onboarding smart groups that allow you to configure evaluation down to as quickly as every 1 minute. We think you'll find this new concept very helpful for quick and easy device onboarding.
Has FileWave 16.2 made OS patching even better? You bet it has! We have included 3 new options for OS patching that make patching even easier to manage:
FileWave 16.2 includes enhanced language support outside of our traditional English default configuration. First, using an AI engine, we have added additional languages in the product. We have added French, Spanish, Swedish, Dutch, Turkish, Thai, and Filipino to our existing support for Japanese, Chinese, Korean and German.
Additionally, you no longer have to do anything special to use any of these languages: both FileWave Central and Anywhere admin consoles will default to any of those languages if your OS/Browser are set to a matching language. And, if you'd prefer to stick with English, or prefer to choose which specific language your admin uses, you can do so within the configuration of each admin console directly (no more scripts!).
And one last thing...because the translations are AI generated, this means you may have feedback to make the translations better, or you may want us to add additional languages. For either option, we welcome your feedback, and have added a new type of ticket in the support portal for "Product Translations" for specific translations feedback.
FileWave is so very capable, but can be overwhelming to a new administrator. In an effort to change this first impression, we are streamlining certain views in 16.2. The iOS Inventory view has been deprecated and removed, and Imaging, Boosters, and Associations views now only show if you have an IVS, Boosters or Associations. This greatly reduces the admin interface and makes for an easier starting point for new administrators.
Our Windows Imaging solution works great, but it has always been difficult to troubleshoot performance issues (or to evaluate if there are performance issues). In version 16.2, we have added two new tools to make this much simpler. First, we introduced iPerf as an included tool on the IVS/imaging client to make it easy to test network capability...many times performance related issues are actually just network constraints, and this tool makes it very easy to see that. Additionally, we have added iftop to the IVS server itself, and iftop allows you as a system admin to see the network utilization of all devices as they image.