Dualog Chat is messaging built for crew and shore teams: every conversation follows the vessel, the rank and the rotation, under a secure identity for each user.
For office work ashore, most companies already have what they need. At sea the picture is different: with no official channel built for the whole crew, conversations spill into personal messaging apps, context is lost at every crew change, and commercial detail drifts outside the company.
In a 2026 Dualog survey of 1,187 seafarers across eight operators, 61% said they reach the office through messaging apps, with nothing company-owned to replace them.
Chat closes that gap, and runs alongside the tools shore already uses. It is the first service available in Workspace by Dualog, the single, identity-secured platform for ship-shore collaboration we recently launched.
What Chat gives your fleet
- Role- and vessel-based channels. Create channels for a single vessel, the whole company, or a specific rank or role such as engineers or officers. Messages posted to a role stay with that role, so its history carries across crew changes.
- Individual secure identities. Every user signs in with their own identity and optional multi-factor authentication. There are no shared logins, and every message and action is attributable to a real person.
- Voice and video calling. Send messages and voice notes, or hold audio and video calls between ship and shore, without switching to a separate app.
- Centralised administration. Manage channels and access from one place. Crew management system integration imports users and keeps access current as crews rotate, and you can also onboard users by CSV. Companies already using Dualog crew accounts can start straight away.
- Reliable access onboard and ashore. Use Chat in a web browser or the iOS and Android apps. Messages send instantly over a live connection, stay queued through drop-outs and send on reconnect, and a low-bandwidth mode saves data.
How it improves your ship-shore communication
Built around how a fleet is organised, Chat changes day-to-day operations in ways crews feel quickly.
- One place for ship and shore. Operational conversations are usually split across email, personal WhatsApp and the occasional Teams account. Chat brings all crew and shore teams into one controlled space, so discussions and the context behind them stay with the company rather than on a private phone.
- Handovers that keep their context. Because a role holds its own message history, an officer signing on inherits what matters straight away, instead of a verbal briefing and an empty inbox.
- The right people, reachable by role. Shore teams can reach every Master across the fleet with one post, or open a channel for Chief Engineers to compare notes between vessels, without pulling in crew who do not need it.
- Access that follows the rotation. Users are grouped by vessel, rank and rotation status, and access is granted or revoked automatically as crews change. Onboarding and offboarding stop being manual IT jobs.
- Where office tools stop, Dualog Chat begins. It is built for vessel operations from the start, with no role-account workarounds and no licence terms to stretch.
“When communication is organised around the vessel and the role, crews stop rebuilding context at every handover, and shore teams reach the right people first time. That saves time on every rotation and keeps operational detail from slipping away with the outgoing crew.”
Silje Moan
Chief Commercial Officer, Dualog
Built-in security and compliance
Every user has a unique identity through Dualog’s identity platform, so access is controlled and every login and action is traceable. More than 80% of alert activity in monitored fleets now sits in crew network zones, where shared logins make legitimate use impossible to tell apart from misuse. The IMO’s MSC-FAL.1/Circ.3/Rev.3 guidelines and IACS Unified Requirements E26/E27 now call for unique identities and an end to shared logins, and class societies, insurers and auditors are asking the same questions. Chat gives administrators a clear audit trail and puts the fleet on the right side of all of them.
It also keeps commercial information inside the company. Rates, negotiations, port instructions and other sensitive exchanges stay in a controlled platform with defined access, rather than in consumer apps beyond the company’s reach.
“Most maritime incidents now begin with a valid login used by the wrong person. When every message is tied to a real identity rather than a shared account, access is controlled, actions are traceable, and meeting IMO and IACS requirements stops being a manual effort.”
Geir Inge Jensen
ISO committee member for Ships and Marine Technology standardisation
and Chief Information Security Officer at Dualog
Getting started
Our team sets it up around your existing fleet and crew structure, so you can move communication onto a secure, traceable environment.
Get a trial and see how it works for your crew and shore teams.
