About a month ago I have had an opportunity to get some information regarding some potential changes regarding DSM7 and some of its features as well as some apps and services that will come at some point in time.

Considering the whole COVID-19 situation as well as Synology decision even before COVID to prolong DSM7 preview rollout, please keep the following disclaimer in mind:

Any information in this particular article is prone to change and might not even make it in the final version of DSM7. No images will be posted because of it but details info will.

Now, considering that the official postpone of preview was announced in February does not mean that it won’t happen this year, but at the moment I wouldn’t hold my breath. When some information on that front comes to light I will share it.

Potential features in DSM7

As I said before, any of these features might go through major or minor changes by the time DSM7 hits the market or they might completely be removed. So what can we expect? I have posted a few questions just to get the general idea, and many under the hood changes are happening. As you can see from the previous post about DSM7 and YT videos, speed was advertised as one of the most noticeable change. Still, in the following list, I will not focus on how fast the UI opens but rather are there any new “gems” that we might expect.

So here is the list of 10 points of which some might not make it, and some are 100% certain to come.

  1. Active Backup for Business (Mac support) - still not on the software release calendar, meaning it won't be any time soon. But, it will arrive at some point. Probably not on DSM7 day one.
  1. User & Groups control panel - There might be a Delegate menu button that will allow admins to give none admin accounts special permissions using permission viewer. At the moment there are seven permission categories and they are as follows:

a) Local user and group management (delegate permissions to create, edit and delete users and groups)

b) Directory account and group management (delegate permissions to edit directory users and groups, and to update domain information)

c) Shared folder management (Delegate permissions to create, edit, and delete shared folders as well as assign shared folder permissions to existing users and groups)

d) Access control and management (Delegate permissions to manage blocklists, protected accounts and trusted clients)

e) System monitoring (Delegate permissions to monitor the system status in Info Center and Resource Monitor)

f) System service management (Delegate permissions to update and repair packages as well as to assign applications privileges to existing users and groups)

g) Hyper Backup management (Delegate permissions to execute backup tasks for Hyper Backup)

  1. Control panel redesign to reduce the total number of sections - some options were combined into new sections and removed as a dedicate icon (like DDNS, router and QC for example)
  1. PhotoStation & Moments replaced with Photos app - this is 100% coming and probably on day one.
  1. SMB service split off the DSM OS code - SMB will be a separate package for faster security threat mitigation. We have seen this happen for some services and apps in the past like iSCSI and File Station for example, so this will probably see the light of day
  1. Hybrid Share - will use the same billing plan for all your C2 storage in HS but only Hyper Backup can access Hyper Backup files and only Hybrid Share can be accessed by File Station. This makes sense, considering that HS is DSM shared folders living in C2. More info in the article linked.
  1. Hybrid Share decryption tool - access HS data without the NAS. This will be the same principle as the Hyper Backup desktop tool and getting to your data from a secondary NAS or C2 without the need of your primary NAS.
  1. Hybrid Share requirements - DSM7, BTRFS, 2GB+ RAM, external network access. Now, these are the current requirements. This will probably mean that not all models will support HS but this will likely change over time.
  1. Storage Pool rename and volume shrink - There will still be no option to rename your pool or to shrink it if it's too large.
  1. DSM themes - still there will only be light/dark mode options, no additional themes or options to officially customize it outside the usual settings (wallpaper, log, login box, etc.).

One more thing to mention here. These informations are from a working DSM 7.0 (better yet VDSM) and again, all prone to any number of changes. Please do not consider anything mentioned here as final by any means, but might give you the idea of the direction that Synology is going with certain elements of DSM.

What are your thoughts on these potential changes and new features? Have you signed up for the upcoming preview of DSM 7?