Synology Inc. today announced the beta release of Active Backup for Office 365, an application that allows businesses to back up data residing in Office 365 to a local Synology NAS. The latest beta version adds support for backing up Office 365 mail, contacts, and calendar on top of the existing OneDrive for Business support, meaning users can enjoy better control and protection of their critical data.
"Since a rapidly growing number of businesses are moving their operations to the cloud, this is our first solution to comprehensively back up corporate data from a cloud provider," said Jia-Yu Liu, Director of Application Group at Synology Inc. "The Active Backup family of packages makes it effortless to consolidate data dispersed across physical, virtual, and cloud environments into a centralized backup solution. More Active Backup solutions to provide virtualization and physical backup will be released in the near future."
Key features include:
- Mail, contacts, and calendar data protection: Personal and shared mailboxes, along with their folder structure, and attachments can all be backed up, along with users' contacts and calendars. This allows businesses to efficiently protect and retain their data against potential loss, deletion, or malicious attack.
- Granular restoration, search, and export: Efficiently filter by keyword with the new content search. From there, users can find the right email and restore and download a single file, mail, mail attachment, contact, and calendar events from a self-service recovery portal, without having to restore an entire backup. Users can preview details of an email or contact before executing restoration to ensure that users restore the intended item.
- Refined management capabilities: A redesigned dashboard for centralized management provides IT admins with transparency into real-time and historical protection of mail, contacts, calendar, and drive services, storage consumption caused by each service and top users, and historical transmission of data from a single interface. In addition, the account discovery feature now supports the automatic addition of newly-added users for mail, contacts, and calendar protection, saving the hassle of manual setup.
License
OneDrive for Business support is free, while advanced features, like mail, contact, and calendar will require purchasing a separate license per user after the conclusion of the beta testing period. No license will be required during the beta period and software will have all functionality available.
Availability
This release is available worldwide immediately, here: https://www.synology.com/en-us/beta/2018_ActiveBackupOffice365
For users looking for a way to make a local backup of their data on Google's G Suite platform, Synology also offers a sister application called Active Backup for G Suite. Details are available here: https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/active_backup_g_suite
