Product test
NAS: data backup in the modern home
by Dominik Bärlocher
Office on the NAS: A look at Synology Office Station
21.9.2017
Translation: machine translated
Microsoft Word is a thing of the past. The future belongs to cloud services like Google Docs. Or does it? Synology Office tries to combine the advantages of both solutions on your home NAS. Will it succeed?
We journalists are always looking for the best way to write and proofread texts. Proofreading, for those not familiar with journalism, is the practice that no text is published without first being read by another member of the editorial team. This helps us to avoid errors in structure, logic and most spelling mistakes.
We have long since written off Microsoft Word. The programme can do everything except really support collaborative work. Only one user can work on a document at a time and there is no versioning. If we tackle a single document with maximum complexity, we send it back and forth, have to save it locally each time and send it again. The version of the file is included in the file name, because there is no other way to do this in a simple and universally understandable form.
The alternative: Google Docs. Google has created a kind of in-house office without further ado. The functions are roughly the same, even if the formatting is more limited. Google is working on a constant expansion, but the motto is clearly "as much as necessary, as little as possible". Nevertheless, it is possible for entire companies to outsource their writing operations to Google Docs. The problem: Google. Anyone who is not entirely comfortable with the gigantic corporation with its endless money and hunger for data will probably give GDocs a wide berth.
NAS manufacturer Synology recently launched its own Office package. Not only does the package, which is simply called "Office", manage to introduce versioning and collaborative features, but data sovereignty always lies with you, the user. Because Synology Office, I'll call it that for better understanding, runs on the NAS.
A Network Attached Storage is essentially nothing more than a gigantic hard drive that is attached directly to your internal network. A small computer system, on which you could not work with Windows or macOS, takes care of storage management and the provision of services. One of these services is Synology Office.
The setup in two clicks
Synology Office is not pre-installed on your NAS, but can be downloaded from Synology's own app store, making installation quite simple.
- Open the Package Centre
- Click on "Install" next to the blue O.
Done.
Setting up all the users is a little more complicated. You have to add the users to the NAS. And this is how it works.
- Open the control panel.
- Click on "User"
- "Create"
- Fill in the fields and then "Next".
- Enable http and users for groups.
- For user quota simply Next.
- Permissions: homes and web on Read/Write, otherwise everything on No Access:
- Application Permissions: Everything on Deny except Office:
- You can ignore speed limits and click on Next:
- And finally: Apply.
The new user will now receive an email from the system. However, as only the internal IP of the NAS is listed there, you still need to send them a link. It goes like this:
https://$yourNasName.quickconnect.to/?launchApp=SYNO.SDS.Office.Application
This allows your users to access the NAS from anywhere in the world and create and edit Office documents.
The employees of Synology Office
That was the complicated part, because now it's time to get clever. Synology Office can currently only handle spreadsheets and documents, but in most cases that's enough.
I don't need to explain how to open and edit a new document, do I? But the collaboration features are where it gets interesting. Because this is something that long-time Word users are not used to.
The sharing settings are located under the icon on the left with the little man and the "+". There you can set who should do what. My colleague Livia Gamper served as the guinea pig. I have given her permission to edit this article.
This is the first time a weakness of Office becomes apparent: Livia doesn't seem to get any notifications. She only sees the notification in her spam folder a few hours later. Therefore the recommendation: If you want to set up the system, put the address from which the notifications are sent on a whitelist. This looks quite nice on the administration page: If for some reason you forgot to link a mail account to your NAS so that the system can send you notifications about updates and other things, Synology Office will remind you and a wizard will help you with the setup.
Well then, let's get writing
I wrote this article here on the NAS Office. I could have done it in Word or Google Docs. Or in Notepad or Brackets. But my aim is to get the feel for Synology Office. And I have to say: it fits. It's not remarkable now. After a short period of familiarisation, everything fits. Just as it should. After a brief reorientation with the menus and the general layout with sidebar, I can simply concentrate on writing and that's it. That's exactly how it should be.
The only thing that bothers me is that Synology Office has a somewhat peculiar view of pages. I always write on the same page, which has the margins on the side like I'm used to in Word or GDocs, but there are no virtual pages. The page just goes on and on and on. Into infinity. This is so unfamiliar that somehow it just doesn't suit me.
But that's definitely a good thing: I don't really have to worry about data protection. My document data is on my NAS. I know exactly where it is, in which jurisdiction and who has access to it. Of course, Google invests far more money and research into improving its own security than I do, but there is also the social aspect: my NAS is not a high profile target. What do they find on me? A document or two every few months about a product that has not yet been released in Switzerland. There's no question of a gigantic data leak here. That's how I like it.
In conclusion, I can only say this: I like Synology Office better than Google Docs because of the data sovereignty. I like Google Docs better than Microsoft Word for collaboration. If you're thinking about buying a NAS for your home or business, Synology Office is quick to install and will give you a lot of pleasure.
Your chance to win - the competition is over
Speaking of joy. You can win a NAS. We are giving away a Synology DS1817+. All you have to do is answer one question. And that would be:
Update: I've removed the question because the competition has been over for just under a month and answers are still rolling in. The competition is definitely and most definitely over.
We accept both the exact calculation and the rule-of-thumb calculation as answers. The competition runs until 27/09/2017 at 23:59. Update: The competition is over. That's it! That's it! Thank you for taking part, but new answers will no longer be considered. So there's no point anymore.
The small print (read this!)
Conditions of participation: All natural persons resident in Switzerland who are at least 18 years old are eligible to take part. Employees of Digitec Galaxus AG are excluded from the competition. Each participant may only take part in the competition once in order not to be excluded. No correspondence will be entered into about the competition and there is no legal recourse.
Journalist. Author. Hacker. A storyteller searching for boundaries, secrets and taboos – putting the world to paper. Not because I can but because I can’t not.
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