Preliminary Information: AOS 6.99 Firmware for EMA

We're pleased to inform you of the latest improvements in AOS 6.99 firmware for EMA. This is the final minor interim update before the new AOS 7.0 release.

We recommend installing this update, which has been thoroughly tested and approved for production use in EMA.

Installation

Administrators can install the update package manually in EMA via the "Information/Firmware" page from today. Automatic distribution will commence on 5th November 2025.

Enhanced Password Policies for EMA Administrator Accounts

In addition to the usual minor bug fixes, AOS 6.99 delivers an important security enhancement for administrator accounts in EMA. Password policies now enable you to protect administrator accounts against brute-force attacks and meet compliance requirements.

The user interface includes a new "Password Rules" section. When enabled, various security rules take effect:

• Password Complexity: Configures password length, character requirements and security rules, including detection of insecure password patterns.
• Password History: Prevents reuse of previously used passwords through encrypted storage of a configurable number of historical passwords.
• Password Age Rules: Enforces both a maximum password age (automatic expiry) and a minimum password age (protection against excessively frequent changes).
• Account Lockout: Following a configurable number of failed login attempts, the administrator account is automatically locked, by default for 30 minutes.

The new password policies deliberately apply only to administrator accounts, as the majority of our customers handle user authentication via enterprise SSO providers, which already enforce their own password policies.

Should you require password policies for local EMA user accounts as well, please let us know. This will help us better prioritise such an enhancement request.

Do you have questions about the new firmware or need assistance with installation? We're here to help. Simply open a support ticket.

Important Notes in Preparation for AOS 7.0

Our focus now turns to finalising AOS 7.0, which is currently being actively tested and will be completed shortly. This major release will bring significant new features, an extensive GUI refresh and numerous detailed improvements to look forward to.

As part of these improvements, please note the following important points:

AOS 7.0 will be the final firmware update supporting EMA on-premise appliances sold before 2010. Future versions after AOS 7.0 will no longer support these hardware generations.

The reason lies in our transition to a unified architecture for EMA Cloud and EMA On-Premise. Unifying the architecture enables us to deliver additional security features and further improve performance. Should you be operating an affected appliance, we're happy to support your migration to a current hardware generation.

The legacy integration program for Microsoft Outlook, which creates a folder in classic Outlook and activates the web view for it, will be removed from the product with AOS 7.0. Microsoft disabled folder web view by default in 2017 for security reasons. Since then, it has only been activatable manually via a registry entry.

Modern alternatives are available for EMA: a free COM add-in for classic Outlook, as well as a free modern add-in for classic Outlook, new Outlook and Outlook Web App.

Should you have already downloaded the legacy integration program for Microsoft Outlook, it will continue to function in principle. However, please note that Microsoft will remove the old Internet Explorer engine (Trident/MSHTML) from classic Outlook in 2026. At that point, the legacy folder web view will no longer be available.

AOS 7.0 introduces the ability to authenticate users via OAuth2. This enables modern single sign-on scenarios and integration with cloud identity providers. AOS 7.0 will therefore be the final version supporting the outdated single sign-on methods NTLM and EMA Ticket Server. These will be removed in a future version in favour of modern authentication methods.

In AOS 7.0, support for Internet Explorer 11 in the web interface will be discontinued. All current versions of Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari will naturally continue to be supported. Microsoft ended support for Internet Explorer 11 in 2022. Due to the legacy integration program for Microsoft Outlook, we had nonetheless maintained compatibility with Internet Explorer 11 for selected areas of the EMA web interface.

Our decision to focus on modern browsers enables us to utilise current web standards and thereby further improve the user interface.

Important Planned Changes After AOS 7.0

To ensure the long-term maintainability and development of EMA, we're planning to focus on established standards following AOS 7.0.

Should you actively use any of the features listed below, we ask that you inform us. Please open a support ticket. Your feedback assists us with future planning.

In the EMA Voice module, we intend to remove support for analogue and ISDN telephone cards. We're also evaluating removal of the voice protocols IAX and H.323, as SIP has established itself as the standard in practice, with the vast majority of installations exclusively using SIP.

In the EMA Print module, we plan to transition from device-specific printer drivers to universal IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) drivers. Maintaining the device-specific printer driver database is constantly becoming more difficult, whilst IPP has established itself as the standard in business environments. This transition should also significantly improve compatibility with Microsoft Universal Print and with modern Windows and Mac clients.

For authenticators, which connect user login in EMA to existing password databases, we plan to remove the HTTP, POP3, SMTP, SSH and IMAP interfaces. The methods to remain will be LDAP, RADIUS and SMB (Windows file server).

We intend to remove the connection to archive storage via SSH (SFTP) from EMA, as this method has proven too slow for production use in practice.

We'll provide advance notice once AOS 7.0 has been approved for production use. Should you have any questions in the meantime, please don't hesitate to get in touch.