Maritime software provider Dualog has moved all of its internal messaging and file sharing from Slack and Teams to Workspace, the ship-shore collaboration platform it recently introduced to shipping companies. For the past three months, every Dualog office and department has run its day-to-day communication on the platform.
The company mapped itself onto a shipping fleet. Its offices in Tromsø, Hamburg, Singapore and Athens became the “vessels”, each with its own crew, while support, operations and finance act as shore teams. Channels and access are organised as they would be for a fleet reporting to a head office. The approach, known in software as dogfooding, lets Dualog test the problems Workspace was built to solve, from crew onboarding to handovers, on itself first.
Inside Workspace, users are grouped automatically by ship, rank and rotation, and integration with crew management systems can grant and revoke access as crews change. That addresses two of the hardest problems in shipping, slow onboarding and lost handovers, which Dualog says it can now observe and refine in live conditions before customers meet them.
Use has been active from the start. In the first month, staff sent almost 30,000 messages, 7,000 of them in channels, and shared more than 600 files across web, desktop and mobile. Since June, Dualog has shipped more than 200 improvements, among them a reliability rewrite for poor connections, a native mobile experience and an admin analytics dashboard.
Every user works under a single secure identity rather than a shared login, which Dualog positions as the key difference from a generic chat tool used at sea, and as central to meeting IMO and IACS identity and access requirements.
“Using Workspace to run our own company has been the fastest way to make it better,” said Mikael Johannessen, Product Manager for Workspace at Dualog. “We put every new feature to work across our own crews and shore teams first, so we learn from real use before we roll it out.”
“For a shipowner, the value is straightforward,” said Silje Moan, Chief Commercial Officer at Dualog. “Communication that follows the vessel, the rank and the rotation removes friction fleets live with every day: lost handovers, shared logins and decisions buried in personal apps the company never sees.”
Chat, the first service in Workspace, is now open for early access, with file sharing, maritime email and a native AI assistant to follow.
Dualog will present Workspace at SMM 2026 in Hamburg, from 1 to 4 September, at Hall B6, Stand 609. Visitors are invited to join The Dualog Arctic Delights, the company’s signature event, on Wednesday 2 September at 14:00.
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