Pharos Release Expands Platform with Direct Print and Print-at-Home Capabilities

By Team Pharos | March 16, 2022

The Pharos Cloud platform is a fully-featured, cloud-native print management solution designed to help enterprise organizations eliminate infrastructure, enhance security of print workflows, gain insights to optimize enterprise printing, and enable employees with intuitive print workflows. The new release introduces two new licensable products—Pharos Direct Print and Pharos Print-at-Home, major feature enhancements that enable organizations to adhere to local data privacy and sovereignty requirements and reduce their printing costs, and a rebrand of the Beacon platform to better reflect its value.

Migrate Direct-to-Printer Workflows to the Cloud with Pharos Direct Print
Direct Print is a new licensable product enabling cloud-forward organizations with multi-vendor print fleets to migrate direct-to-printer workflows in the office to the cloud to eliminate print infrastructure and vendor driver management. Approved users print in a way they are familiar with—select the printer and the documents are released immediately to the selected printer on the company network, but the process behind the scenes is more secure and doesn’t require the complex IT overhead of traditional printing.
Pharos Direct Print:

Eliminates costly print servers by migrating print to the cloud
Drives IT productivity by eliminating the hassle of vendor print driver management
Provides a familiar and consistent way for users to print from Windows, macOS, and Chrome OS to all print devices—regardless of manufacturer
Enhances security by eliminating print server vulnerabilities and reducing attack vectors, securing print paths with end-to-end encryption, and supporting zero trust security principles

Gain Visibility and Control of Employees’ At-Home Printing—With or Without VPN
To address the printing challenges companies are facing with the increasingly remote and hybrid workforce, Pharos is introducing Pharos Print-at-Home. Pharos Print-at-Home enables companies to gain visibility and control over employees’ at-home printing—with or without VPN connection. Approved users can print directly to personal devices on their home network—but companies are now able to:

Gain visibility over what employees are printing at home
Enable employees to add and print to personal printers on their home network without modifying the computer’s access controls
Control and manage what remote employees can print on their home network with the new Policy Print feature
Reduce Help Desk time supporting unfamiliar print devices with a consistent print driver experience to at-home printers, regardless of manufacturer

Adhere to Data Privacy and Data Sovereignty Requirements
As organizations become increasingly global, protecting sensitive data, ensuring it remains under the control of its owner, and complying with country-specific requirements have become greater concerns. The new Data Privacy capability enables organizations to adhere to their local data privacy and data sovereignty requirements—even for BYOD and guest printing—by controlling what data is collected and where it is stored. The platform provides 21 pre-created regions in the Management Console that correlate to secure AWS S3 repositories globally, and Administrators can:

Set Job Storage policy by region
Create data collection policy by region
Support Region switching within Print Scout

Reduce Printing Costs with Policy Print
For many companies, printing is often one of the largest uncontrolled expenses. The new release helps reduce printing costs by enforcing organizational print policies and educating users of mindful printing habits at the point of print submission. Policy Print is a new capability enabling Administrators to create and assign policies that limit capabilities that employees have access to for Direct Print, Secure Release, and Print-at-Home jobs, including color, simplex/duplex, page count, document name, and connection type.
Customizable notifications:

Encourage more efficient options at the point of action (i.e. “Printing this document in color will cost about $7.50. You can reduce costs by over 80% if you cancel the job and resubmit it in black & white”)
Notify employees about company printing policies (i.e. “Documents should not be printed in color. Please make selections that are compatible with our policies.”)

Beacon is now Pharos Cloud
Coinciding with this release, Pharos is rebranding the Beacon Platform and its components to demonstrate our commitment to the cloud and enhance product recognition: