Synology Note Station

Posted by MadaboutDana
May 24, 2015 at 04:22 PM

Having recently acquired a new Synology server to replace our old, trusty but finally expired CubeStation, I’ve been very impressed by the Note Station module that can be installed on the exceptionally capable operating system behind all Synology servers (DSM 5.2 at the time of writing). It’s a really powerful multi-pane note-taking tool that allows you to share notebooks, enter rich-text notes (or indeed graphics, recordings and other attachments), and even offers a note-integrated task management facility.

The search function is still a little basic, but the rest of it is awesome. You can create ‘shelves’ for your notebooks, which basically nest them (rather like Ulysses: if you click on the ‘shelf’, it shows you all the contents of the embedded notebooks, or you can select individual notebooks to see their notes exclusively; it also has an ‘All Notes’ function). You can create tags. You can capture web page contents directly to notebooks using a nice web clipper extension for Chrome that is not unlike OneNote’s (so you can choose to save the simplified ‘article’ view instead of the full web page view). Oh, and you can import your Evernote notebooks, too (indeed, the whole thing is clearly inspired by Evernote). The search function is very fast, so the system appears to full-text index everything, but although you can constrain searches by date, notebook etc., search results simply list the notes containing the text you’re looking for - there are no highlights inside the notes, and no useful snippet previews of relevant sentences in the list of results. You can move from note to note (the search result shares the same left-hand navigation tree as the standard note management window), but you won’t see pretty highlights. Still, can’t have everything!

For to-do management, you can create to-dos from within notes. In this case, they will appear in a separate list when you click the ‘to-do’ icon in the navigation bar above the relevant note, so you can have any number of to-dos associated with a given note. Even better, they will also appear in a separate list of to-dos that also includes reminders, priorities and can be sorted by date. You can jump directly from a to-do in this list to the associated rich-text note (useful because the notes, again like OneNote, support checkboxes, complex tables and other such task management paraphernalia). This jump function doesn’t work, by the by, in the mobile app (yet), but the software appears to be evolving very rapidly.

Currently the whole thing runs through a web browser (although you can set up the server so it opens directly into notebooks for you, effectively treating a Chrome tab as an application). Best of all, there’s a very good app for iOS - called DS Note - that runs very nicely on iPad. I’m just checking out the iPhone version to see if it’s as nice as the iPad one. Ah, yes, it is. Very nicely done. It even shows web pages. Excellent!

One of the advantages of running stuff on your own Synology server is the company’s QuickConnect function, whereby you can set up a direct link to your server from anywhere at all, protected by HTTPS if you wish (always advisable). This is seriously useful. For me, it’s a no-brainer: this immediately supersedes Evernote, because it’s under my direct control and I can share stuff with colleagues (and friends and family) if I wish to. The sharing function is very powerful, and you can share entire notebooks with a couple of clicks, as well as individual notes.

Indeed, it even supports sharing through a fairly broad selection of social media. I’m looking forward to seeing how it all evolves, I must say.

I hope this is useful for others interested in collaborative note taking! For those alarmed at the thought of buying an entire server just to get access to an outliner/info management app, do bear in mind that Synology servers are incredibly capable machines that support all platforms, are compatible with e.g. Apple Time Machine and have their own built-in file version management system, and are available in many different guises, ranging from very modestly priced single-drive machines to huge rack-mounted monsters with multiple disk arrays. Our old CubeStation was a four-disk NAS, but this time we’ve opted for a two-disk NAS (a DiskStation) because we already synchronise most of our key work files to the Cloud. This machine will act as a secondary backup option plus a useful repository for other info. The two disks are held in an advanced RAID array called a Synology Hybrid configuration. No idea what that means, but one disk is mirrored to the other, which means that running a couple of Western Digital Red 3TB disks, we’re got about 2.7 TB of storage space. Oh, and the DiskStation itself can use OneDrive for Cloud backups, too, so if you’ve got an Office 365 subscription, you can use some of your 1TB of storage space for DiskStation backups. I think the word I’m searching for is ‘neat’. Or possibly ‘awesome’.

Cheers,
Bill