One entrance to solve the three issues of document management, collaborative office work, and synchronous backup.

Synergy Drive - is this new package of Qunhui useful?

Qunhui: In the impression, a company focused on storage, starting with NAS products, has been making continuous efforts in the cloud market in recent years, and has also been deeply involved in the field of data application and office collaboration. From chat, an online document form tool, Synology Office and Spread Sheet, to the integration of File Station SYNOLOGY Office and Cloud Station are three mainstream suites and provide an entrance to the SYNOLOGY Drive. It is not hard to make such a strong attack on the cloud collaboration and collaborative office market.

In fact, among a series of product and technology upgrading plans announced by Qunhui Global Press Conference in September this year, Synergy Drive is the one that attracts the most attention. Especially for me, I am so fed up with the crazy reading and writing speed of a drive, and the "scandal" of data loss that breaks out from time to time in a disk, I look forward to its debut!

Starting from the product, the private cloud attribute of NAS itself and the access speed in the LAN seem to make it have more advantages than other similar tools when it was launched. Therefore, the first time I experienced the release of Synology Drive in early November.

The so-called simplicity is almost the highest requirement for a product and a software. What's more, the Syntology Drive, which integrates the three core application scenarios in the office, is it easy to use?

Then, let's explore it from the aspects of download and installation, interface overview, function experience, terminal support, etc!

First of all, Qunhui's consistent lightweight page style

After entering the familiar Qunhui DSM operation interface and upgrading DSM6.2 beta, you can download the Synergy Drive suite. As shown in the following figure, we will see two new packages on the package page:

1. Drive management console

2.    Drive

The Drive Management Console is just like the "System Preferences" in ios. Through the console, we can see the connected devices (client list), the operation information (log center) in the daily use of the Drive, add or update team folders, and make overview settings for access permissions and synchronized data.  

Overview: Drive operation status overview

Client list: number of connected clients and basic information

Settings: Synchronize profile and user permission settings

On the other hand, when we open the Drive, we can see Qunhui's lightweight and simple page.

From the use, Drive gives me the most intuitive feeling like a visual resource manager based on web pages. My files, team folders, files I share with others, files I share with others, and even recently browsed and tagged files are classified to quickly find the files I want, which is often the first step to improve work efficiency.

At the same time, Qunhui has also inserted their collaborative management plug-ins into the Drive, including Chat, Smart Photo Management Suite Moments, Calendar, etc. In other words, the Drive, which cooperates with other collaborative management plug-ins, almost covers most of the application scenarios in work.

Insert Qunhui plug-in to make office more efficient

Those who are familiar with Qunhui must have seen that compared with the file station of Qunhui DSM, the drive is obviously more business like.

Of course, business style is not only about interface, but also about experience

After preliminary use, I think you can fully understand Synology Drive as an office operating system on the web, because it can do the common upload, sharing, encryption, tagging, collaboration and other behaviors in work. Here, I would like to explain from three aspects: document management, document sharing, and document collaboration.

Managing documents: It may be simpler than the online disk we are familiar with

To upload data, Drive provides a variety of options and paths. You can drag or specify a path to transfer data on your computer to the Drive folder;

At the same time, Qunhui will certainly not forget their natural advantage - NAS: today, when SSDs are popular and PC capacity is not as good as before, the large capacity attribute of NAS itself is the centralized storage box for all kinds of data, and the Drive naturally allows you to retrieve the desired data from NAS. Looking back, in fact, insufficient capacity is really nothing!

Upload files from PC to Drive

Retrieve files from NAS and upload them to Drive

If you have your own requirements for each file, and archiving needs to conform to your own habits, then you need to use the "tag" function of the Drive in front of cold documents to customize one or more tags, which can not only help you better retrieve files, but also greatly improve work efficiency.

Custom label name and color

Attach a specific label to each document. You can also find the specified document through the label

In terms of document management, the Drive also provides a simple and practical small function: you can encrypt some files that you do not want to disclose. The operation method may be simpler than clicking "right click" on the network disk:  

Select the specified file, right-click, and select Encrypt

Set the access password

In daily office work, it is far more than document management and retrieval. The sharing of various files is also an important indicator. What about the sharing of documents on Synology Drive?

Sharing documents: for collaboration and sharing within the enterprise, one NAS is enough!

In this regard, Qunhui continues its core architecture of taking NAS as the file center and NAS groups and users as users. That is to say, when an enterprise selects Qunhui NAS as the data center and file center and sets the relevant permissions for each employee, document sharing will no longer require the help of third-party software, but simply click "Share" to complete.

Select the file you want to share and right-click Share

Select the users you want to share and set their permissions (editing represents read-write, viewing represents read-only)

After a simple two-step operation, the shared file can be seen in the category of Share with Me

Although this seems to be a closed source, considering the equipment, personnel and management costs of building an enterprise's internal file management system and file server, Qunhui NAS, which is simple and easy to use, is still an option for start-ups.

Because perhaps the biggest change of the Drive is the multi person collaboration after document sharing.

Document collaboration: more compatible collaboration suite and efficient multi person collaboration

At the level of collaborative office, Qunhui has successively launched Office, SpreadSheet and other packages. In the initial use, it always felt that there were many areas that needed improvement. This time, the Synology Drive integrated with Office has not only supported three file formats commonly used in our work: Word、Excel、PPT， In terms of support for functions such as common formulas in Excel, although it is not comparable to Microsoft, it is more than enough to complete daily work.

Now that the format and functions are supported, the next task is to work together to complete a responsible task. For example, for a large project that needs to be detailed and allocated to each different person, everyone can mark the completed progress in the table, and managers can easily see the specific person's marks through the table.

Cooperate with others to edit, modify and update documents

Drive， A NAS suite more suitable for enterprise office scenarios, such as simple operation, sharing, collaboration, and management. More importantly, with the launch of the Drive suite, Drive PC client and mobile APP are launched simultaneously. The consequent benefits not only lie in the improvement of work efficiency brought by keeping working documents up to date, It is also because the Drive follows the synchronization feature of Cloud Station - to restore data of any previous version at any time to avoid losses caused by accidental deletion. Take PC client as an example:

Enter the user name and password to connect to the NAS and enable synchronization

Drive provides two options for synchronization tasks, one is to complete the synchronization between designated folders on NAS and PC; The other is to synchronize all the files shared with me to the designated folder on PC.

After synchronization is enabled, the system will automatically perform according to the settings

After synchronization, you can find specific files in the drive in the folder specified by your PC

At the same time, Drive synchronization also supports three modes, namely two-way synchronization, only uploading data, and only downloading data, which can be selected according to actual needs.  

The above is the first experience of Synergy Drive. If I can make an objective and fair evaluation, I will try to make a summary in four sentences:

This is not the most comprehensive cooperative office suite

However, its experience degree can meet most enterprise office scenarios

If the high capacity, scalability and security provided by Qunhui NAS are added

Maybe it will become a new choice for many start-ups