preface.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<preface xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook"
      xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" version="5.0"
      xml:id="preface">
  <title>Preface</title>

  <sect2>
    <title>Mission</title>

    <para>This book aims to provide practical strategies for deploying
    RTC with the technology available today.</para>
  </sect2>

  <sect2>
    <title>Vision</title>

    <para>A world where open standards and free software are the foundation
    of personal and business communications, enabling genuine innovation
    and the emergence of more disruptive technologies.</para>
  </sect2>

  <sect2>
    <title>Who is this document for?</title>

    <para>IT managers, system administrators, developers, web designers,
    product managers and IT users who want best-practice
    Real-Time Communications (RTC) technology for business or
    private use.</para>
  </sect2>

  <sect2>
    <title>What is Free RTC?</title>

    <para>Running your own, independent, federated and peer-to-peer RTC
    solutions, including instant messaging (IM), voice-over-IP (VoIP),
    video/webcam, social networking and WebRTC, using open standards and,
    in many cases, free, open source software.</para>
  </sect2>

  <sect2>
    <title>Why?</title>

    <para>There are many reasons organizations and individuals need to
    run their own RTC infrastructure:</para>

    <para><emphasis>Resilience:</emphasis> operating RTC servers to the
    same high standard as the rest of your non-stop infrastructure rather
    than relying on some vendor who provides a free download for anybody
    and everybody.</para>

    <para><emphasis>Security:</emphasis> avoid installing proprietary,
    third party communications apps and plugins.</para>

    <para><emphasis>Privacy:</emphasis> avoid letting sensitive information
    be harvested by cloud providers.</para>

    <para><emphasis>Brand building:</emphasis> keep users on your own
    web site, assert your domain name in all communication sessions.</para>

    <para><emphasis>Control:</emphasis> recognize callers who are already
    logged in to your web site and route their call efficiently based on
    language, account size or other factors.</para>

    <para><emphasis>Innovation:</emphasis> in traditional phone companies,
    technical innovation has slowed.  Open standards and free
    software allow individuals and businesses of any size to engage
    in genuine innovation, creating new and original services that run
    across the network.</para>
  </sect2>

  <sect2>
    <title>How?</title>

    <para>This documentation aims to help you choose strong, best of breed,
    stable and supported components based on
    <link xlink:href="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html">genuinely
    free software</link> and open standards.  There are step-by-step
    instructions for DNS, firewall and server configuration and testing
    to achieve maximum chance of success for every call or chat connection
    your users need to make.</para>

    <para>Thanks to the convenient packages in Linux (Debian, Ubuntu,
    Fedora and Red Hat/RHEL/CentOS), most IT professionals will be able
    to set this up in less than one day, the most experienced reader
    will find that it can be set up in less than an hour.</para>
  </sect2>

</preface>