Stop creating a Synology shared folder for every employee. Plan folders by team, match groups to teams, and let DSM home folders handle personal files.
The most common Synology mistake costs nothing to avoid: creating a shared folder for every person instead of one for every team. It feels personal and friendly on day one. By month six, the person has left, the folder is locked to a dead account, and nobody knows which of the three copies holds the real file. Teams outlive people - plan folders for teams.
Example only - team folders survive staff changes. Person folders do not.
Work belongs to a role, not a human. The bills folder serves whoever does accounts this year. When folders carry people's names, every staff change becomes a small migration project, permissions get copied in a panic, and old folders pile up because deleting a person's folder feels dangerous. Team folders remove the emotion: the folder stays, only the group membership changes.
Keep it shallow - one shared folder per team or function, subfolders inside for years or projects:
office - things the whole company shares: templates, notices, formsaccounts, sales, projects - one per teamarchive-YYYY - closed work, moved once a year, set read onlyhome folder automatically - that is the correct home for personal files, not a shared folder with their nameCreate one DSM group per team folder and give the group Read/Write on its folder. Joiner? Add them to the group. Leaver? Remove them from the group and disable their account. The folder plan and the permission plan become the same simple picture, and you can explain both on one whiteboard.
Honest answer: you rarely need to rename anything today. Leave the old folder where it is, create the team folder properly, copy the live work across, and set the old folder to Read only for a month before removing it. Announce one date after which the team folder is the only truth. Muddle survives because nobody sets that date.
home folder DSM manages itself. The moment two people must work in it, it was a team folder all along.
The full shared folder setup - creating folders, users and permissions - shown live on a Synology NAS.
▶️ Watch Full VideoUsually between four and ten: one per team or function, one everyone-folder, and yearly archives. If you are creating a new top-level shared folder every week, the plan is too fine-grained - use subfolders inside a team folder instead, they inherit the same permissions.
That is a permissions question, not a naming question. Create the folder by its function (for example md-office), make a small group with just those two people, and give only that group access. The folder keeps working when the assistant changes.
Yes - select it in Control Panel → Shared Folder and choose Edit to change the name. But remember that mapped drives and shortcuts on every PC point at the old name, so a rename means touching every computer. Planning team names first is cheaper than renaming later.