Synology Releases Moments, Drive, And Office Apps To Its Package Center

Synology, a company well-known for its NAS devices and the DSM operating system that runs on top of them, announced the official release of three major packages on its Package Center marketplace.  The three, Drive, Office, and Moments, look to help customers change the way they store, organize, share and secure their private data.

Moments is a convenient way to backup photos from a user’s computer or smartphone and share them with friends and family.  Synology has even included the ability to automatically identify people, places and objects in photos, and sort them into albums accordingly.  This sounds very similar to what Apple provides with its Photos app and we’re interested to see how well it works once we’ve had time to play around with it.

Drive isn’t necessarily a new offering from Synology, but rather a complete redesign of its own Cloud Station Suite.  The user interface is more intuitive and when we went hands on with it at CES 2018 last week, it felt a lot like Google’s own Drive.  That’s not a bad thing, by the way.  Whether its interoffice collaboration or simply the ability to store and sync data in multiple locations, Drive is sure to be a hit.  I personally pay each month for extra drive space from Google.  It’s a nominal amount but over the course of a year or two, I pay enough to purchase a Synology NAS of my own and have access to far more data than I would otherwise have with Google.

Speaking of interoffice collaboration, Office is Synology’s own browser-based editor.  Think Google Docs but stored and maintained locally.  Office allows users to create, share and simultaneously work on documents, spreadsheets and slides and all of this can be managed within Drive.

All three of these apps are available now for download in Package Center.  Be sure to check out the compatibility list at Synology.com to see if your NAS is on the list.  Some models can only do people recognition, some can do both image and people, and unfortunately, some can’t do either.