Three months ago, we moved all our internal messaging and file sharing from Slack and Teams to Workspace by Dualog, the new ship-shore platform we recently introduced to our customers. Every office and every department now runs its day-to-day internal communication on it. Slack and Teams had served us well, but building a product for an industry is one thing, and running your own company on it is another.
The practice has a name in software: dogfooding, using your own product day to day so you find and fix its weaknesses before customers do. For Workspace, we took it a step further. The platform is built around how ships and shore teams work, so we set it up to mirror exactly that.
Testing the problems we built it to solve
We mapped Dualog onto a shipping company. Our offices, Tromsø, Hamburg, Singapore, Athens and the rest, became the “vessels”, each with its own crew. Support, operations and finance became the shore teams. Channels and access are organised the way they would be for a fleet reporting to a head office, so every part of the company communicates within the same structure our customers operate in.
That setup lets us test the exact problems Workspace was built to solve, on ourselves first. The most valuable has been onboarding. Quick crew onboarding and smooth handovers are among the hardest problems in shipping, and among the first we set out to fix. Watching colleagues who joined Dualog over recent months find their way in through Workspace, inheriting the right channels and history from day one, has shown us in real conditions where onboarding works well and where it still needs sharpening.
The first months of real use
The use has been active from the start. In the first month alone, the team sent almost 30,000 messages, 7,000 of them in channels, and shared more than 600 files across web, desktop, Android and iOS. In practice, Workspace now carries the company’s day-to-day communication: staying up to speed, reaching colleagues and sharing files.
Dogfooding has also set the pace of development. Since June, we have shipped more than 200 improvements to Workspace, many within a day of being suggested. Several have been substantial: a reliability rewrite so messages queue and retry over poor connections, a far more native mobile experience, and an admin analytics dashboard, alongside dozens of smaller refinements. The feedback curve reflects it: the first week brought 127 posts, the fifth only 12, as early input quickly gave way to polish and new capabilities.
“Using Workspace to run our own company has been the fastest way to make it better. In the first month we were resolving requests almost as quickly as the team could raise them, and within weeks the feedback had moved from the fundamentals to polish. 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.”
Mikael Johannessen
Product Manager, Dualog
Running on the same platform as our customers
For us, this comes down to confidence. The security and efficiency of our own communication now depend on the same platform as our customers’, which is the strongest incentive we could have to keep it reliable and keep improving it.
It also settles a question every IT manager now faces. Every user, ashore or at sea, works under a single secure identity rather than a shared login. That is what separates Workspace from a generic chat tool bolted onto a vessel, and what makes it answerable to the identity and access controls the IMO and IACS increasingly expect.
“For a shipowner, the value is straightforward. 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. It gives crew and shore one controlled place to work together, wherever they are.”
Silje Moan
Chief Commercial Officer, Dualog
New functionality follows the same path. We put it to work across the whole of Dualog first, in the conditions our customers meet every day, and refine it before a wider release.
Chat, the first service in Workspace, is now open for early access: the same identity-secured, ship-aware communication we run our own company on. We built Workspace for shipping, and by running Dualog as if it were a fleet, we meet our customers’ problems before they do.
See how Workspace can work for your fleet and request early access here.
