Administration Interface

The DSM desktop looks nice and includes several icons and widgets, and a taskbar. You can add shortcuts of your favorite applications to the desktop by dragging their icons from the main menu to the desktop. You can also remove shortcuts by right-clicking on them and picking the Remove Shortcut option. The "start" button reveals the main menu and is in the top-right corner, on the taskbar. Next to it are the icons of all open applications. The notification button and all notifications are on the right (you will recognize this button by its exclamation mark).


The DSM 5.0 taskbar hides a lot of functionality:
1) Show Desktop: Minimizes all open application and package windows.
2) Main Menu: View and open applications and packages installed on the NAS. You can also click and drag to create desktop shortcuts.
3) Open applications:

• Click an icon to show or hide its window on the desktop.
• Right-click the icon and choose from the shortcut menu to manage the application window (Maximize, Minimize, Restore, Close) or its taskbar icon (Pin to Taskbar, Unpin from Taskbar).

4) Upload Queue: Appears when you start uploading files to the Synology NAS. Click to see more details, like progress and upload speed.
5) Notifications: Displays notifications, like errors, status updates, and package installation notifications.
6) Options: Shutdown, restart, logout, or Modify Personal Account options.
7) Search: Quickly find specific applications, packages, or DSM Help articles here.
8) Widgets: Show or hide widgets.
9) Pilot View: See a preview of all open application and package windows.


All applications that come pre-installed are depicted above.


As you can see in the above screenshot, creating application shortcuts is very easy.


You can select which widget to show or hide.


The admin options allow you to manage personal account options, like changing the password, enabling 2-step verification, checking on account activity, etc.


The same options menu provides you with the ability to customize the desktop's appearance by changing your background, the text color, or uploading images to be used as desktop wallpapers. There is also a "Social Network" tab through which you may sign into a social network account (e.g. Facebook, Google+, etc.) to take advantage of more features. These include the creation of file-sharing links that will only be available to select social-networking friends in File Station. The "other" tab includes such miscellaneous options as enabling a confirmation window when leaving DSM, enabling instant previews on the taskbar, etc.


DSM's search function comes in handy when you need to find something fast.


All notifications can be found here.