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Pharos Launches New Print-at-Home Print-Management and Direct Print Solutions

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Pharos Systems International, which provides print-management software and solutions, recently announced new print-management solutions. These include Print-at-Home for managing and monitoring employees printing at home, and new Direct-Print for moving enterprise printing to the cloud. The company also announced new Policy Print for reducing print costs, new data-privacy capabilities, and a rebranding of Pharos Beacon.

Managed At-Home Printing

One of the challenges enterprises have faced with hybrid work is monitoring how and what employees are printing at home. With Pharos Print-at-Home, however, enterprises can now monitor and know what and how much employees are printing at home from their work computer. This includes employees printing to locally attached printers, multi-brand printers, and with or without a virtual private network connection.

Approved users can print directly to personal devices on their home network, while the enterprise can:

  • Gain visibility over what employees are printing at home.
  • Reduce the IT burden by enabling remote employees to easily discover and add printers on their own, without IT having to provide local administrative privileges.
  • Control and manage what remote employees can print on their home network with the new Policy Print feature (see below).
  • Reduce Help Desk time supporting unfamiliar printers with a consistent print-driver experience for at-home printers, regardless of printer manufacturer.
  • With Zero Trust Security, enhance security with a cloud-native platform that supports Zero Trust security principles, and secure workstation to printer paths with end-to-end encryption.

For more information on Print-at-Home, visit Pharos here.

Pharos Direct Print

The new Direct Print solution enables organizations with multi-vendor print fleets to migrate direct-to-printer workflows in the office to the cloud to eliminate print infrastructure and print-driver management.

Approved users print in a way they’re familiar with by selecting the the printer. Documents are released immediately to the selected printer on the company network, but the process behind it is said to be more secure and doesn’t require the complex IT overhead of traditional printing.

Advantages include:

  • Eliminates costly print servers by migrating print to the cloud.
  • Eliminates managing print drivers.
  • Provides a familiar and consistent way for users to print from Microsoft Windows, Apple 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

Visit Pharos here for more information.

Reduce Print Costs with Policy Print

The company also noted that for many companies, printing is often one of the largest uncontrolled expenses. Pharos says its new Policy Print capability helps reduce printing costs by enforcing organizational print policies and educating users about efficient printing habits at the point of print submission.

Policy Print is a new capability enabling administrators to create and assign policies that limit print capabilities, and is available for Direct Print, Secure Release, and Print-at-Home jobs. Administrators can specify or limit color output, simplex/duplex, page count, document name, and connection type.

Customizable notifications include:

  • Encourage more efficient options at the point of print. For instance, the software may be configured to notify users:  “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-and-white.”
  • Notify employees about company printing policies, for instance, specifying that  “Documents should not be printed in color. Please make selections that are compatible with our policies.”

Adhere to Data Privacy and Data Sovereignty Requirements

Pharos noted that 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 Pharos Data Privacy capability enables organizations to adhere to their local data privacy and data sovereignty requirements, including Bring Your Own Device and guest printing, by controlling what data is collected and where it’s stored. The platform provides 21 pre-created regions in the Management Console that correlate to secure Amazon Web Services S3 repositories globally.

Administrators can:

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

Beacon is now Pharos Cloud

Along with its new releases, Pharos is rebranding the Beacon Platform and its components to demonstrate its commitment to the cloud and enhance product recognition:

The new product names, as well as that of additional components, will be rolled out gradually.

For a complete list of new features in this release, please refer to the Release Notes.