This book aims to provide practical strategies for deploying RTC with the technology available today.
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.
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.
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.
There are many reasons organizations and individuals need to run their own RTC infrastructure:
Resilience: 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.
Security: avoid installing proprietary, third party communications apps and plugins.
Privacy: avoid letting sensitive information be harvested by cloud providers.
Brand building: keep users on your own web site, assert your domain name in all communication sessions.
Control: recognize callers who are already logged in to your web site and route their call efficiently based on language, account size or other factors.
Innovation: 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.
This documentation aims to help you choose strong, best of breed, stable and supported components based on genuinely free software 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.
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.