For three decades, the hard problem in shipping was getting a ship connected. That is largely solved; the harder question now is how crews and shore teams work together over that connection. Most still rely on a mix of email, personal messaging apps and generic office software, tools that were never built for the sea.
Dualog is changing this with Workspace, a single identity-secured platform that brings crew and shore into one environment. Every tool inside it understands ships, ranks and rotation, so communication and information follow the way vessels actually operate.
Workspace by Dualog: all the tools for ship-shore collaboration in one place
Workspace is one environment where your whole shipping company works together, ship and shore, instead of stitching together email, personal apps and generic software.
The first service in Workspace is live now: Chat, rank- and ship-based messaging, audio and video calling, built specifically for shipping operations. Get early access to Dualog Chat and be among the first to bring secure and efficient communication to your fleet.
Over the coming months, we will add more tools, bringing your fleet’s communication, information and insights into one place:
- Files: share and store documents across ships and shore teams, so important information is organised and easy to find.
- Mail: use Dualog Mail directly within Workspace, keeping the tools of daily work in one unified environment.
- Assistant: AI built natively into Workspace, working alongside crew and shore as an active assistant. It turns fleet data into answers and helps get work done, from drafting reports and translating messages to keeping inboxes in order and responding to queries right inside your channels.
Built to solve the real problems in fleet operations
Overloaded inboxes. Too many emails is a top frustration for 44% of seafarers. A single master manages 300+ folders per vessel, and email has quietly become the ship’s filing system, with one port-call thread carrying up to 30 recipients.
Scattered, invisible tools. Around 70% of crews already use WhatsApp for work, because official channels feel too slow or cumbersome. Decisions then happen where shore teams have no visibility.
Solutions that don’t understand ships. Generic suites like Microsoft 365 assume one person per license, with no concept of a vessel, rank or rotation. Forcing role-based accounts into them breaks license terms and blocks proper identity management.
Knowledge lost at handover. 74% of crew report losing information when they change over, because context leaves with the outgoing officer. Shared logins make it worse: no one can say who sent a message.
Rising compliance pressure. IMO’s MSC-FAL.1/Circ.3/Rev.3 guidelines and IACS UR E26/E27 both call for unique user identities and traceable access. Shared credentials and personal apps put IT managers on the wrong side of both.
Collaboration in the language of shipping
Workspace is built around how ships actually operate, and it closes each of these gaps.
Rank, vessel and rotation-aware access. Users are grouped automatically by ship, rank and rotation status, whether onboard or ashore. Channels can serve the whole fleet, a single vessel, or one rank. Chief Engineers across the fleet can share technical guidance in one place, without pulling in crew who don’t need it. Masters can be reached fleet-wide with a single post. A message posted as a role stays with the post, not the person, so an officer signing on inherits the history that matters from day one.
Automatic access through CMS integration. Connect a Crew Management System and Workspace grants and revokes access as crew rotate. Onboarding and offboarding stop being a manual IT task, and access never lags behind who is actually on the ship.
Traceable by design. Every user has an individual identity, not a shared login, so every login, message and action ties to a real person. Admins see fleet-wide activity in one dashboard, which supports audits and incident investigations without chasing down who was signed in on which account.
Learn how to protect crew accounts with secure identities
Built for connectivity at sea. Workspace runs on web, desktop and mobile, with a data-saver mode. Offline-tolerant sending means messages queue and retry over unreliable connections instead of getting lost.
What it changes across your fleet
Faster, smoother handovers. Discussion lives in role- and vessel-based channels, not on personal phones, so incoming crew see the relevant history from day one. Ashore, procurement or claims teams reach the Captain or Chief Engineer directly by role, with no personal contact details to track down.
Less time lost to paperwork. Reporting and approvals sit in shared channels, so there are fewer follow-ups to chase a signature or a document. Captains spend less time re-explaining the same update and more time running the ship.
Decisions at the speed of the fleet. Real-time messaging over low-bandwidth links gets operations and crewing an answer the same day, not once the vessel reaches port.
Security that stays current on its own. Because access is tied to identity and rotation, IT managers stop closing accounts by hand or hunting for who still has access. The fleet stays aligned with IMO and IACS expectations for unique identities and traceable access, with no admin follow-up.
Get early access
With Workspace by Dualog, seafarers get modern tools and AI-driven support for their daily work, while fleet managers gain far greater visibility into operations, trends and challenges across the whole organisation.
Workspace is the next step in a journey Dualog began three decades ago: from delivering data to ships, to giving crew and shore one shared place to work.
Get early access to Dualog Workspace.
