[Asterisk-doc] A new contribution to the effort

[Jared Smith]

Comments inline:

On Wed, 2004-07-14 at 00:06 -0400, jim@digitalchemy.ca wrote:
> I would like to contribute to Asterisk generally, and to the
> documentation effort specifically.

Great!  Welcome to the documentation project.  We'd greatly appreciate
any help you're willing to throw our direction.
> 
> 
> As a first effort I would like to offer some editorial assistance by
> proposing a more confident and enthusiastic introduction.What follows
> is intended to replace the two paragraphs under the heading Asterisk:
> The Swiss Army Knife of Telephony

Great!  I've never liked those two paragraphs, and had it on my to-do
list to rewrite them.  Looks like one less thing for me to stress about.


> Welcome to the wonderful world of Asterisk. You are about to discover
> the most powerful and popular open source PBX available. 
> 

Definitely more enthusiastic!

> 
> Asterisk allows you to craft a telephony system to address your
> specific requirements. It does this by providing a library of basic
> telephony functions which you then use as script building-blocks.
> Calls into the system trigger these functions through digit patterns
> (referred to as extensions), giving you complete control of complex
> call routing concepts with relative ease. Common PBX functionality
> such as voicemail, call queuing, conferencing, music on hold and
> others are all included. But that's just the beginning. Asterisk is
> one of the few PBXs in existence that connects legacy telephony
> technologies such as PRI or Analog trunks through the same switching
> logic as state of the art VoIP interfaces such as H.323 or SIP. This
> powerful yet simple core allows complex concepts in other systems to
> be deployed with ease in Asterisk. For example, building an IVR
> application or deploying CTI functionality can be done more
> inexpensively than with any other system. Why? Because with Asterisk,
> it's all built right in! 

My only (minor) concern is that many readers of the book might not
understand what PRI, IVR, and CTI stand for.  Other than that, I lvoe
it.

> 
> 
> Perhaps Asterisk’s most valuable asset is the open nature of the
> system. As with any open-source application, Asterisk can be further
> enhanced by the community of people who use it. This powerful concept
> ensures that Asterisk is prepared to mature in keeping with the
> demands of the industry. Go ahead and modify the source code to fit
> your needs, or, better still, contribute to an active and growing
> development community. 
> 

Looks good.

> 
> Because Asterisk is so powerful and flexible,  in this book we can
> only begin to cover all the possible uses and configurations. We will
> therefore focus on the most commonly used features of the system and
> answer the most frequently asked questions. If you can work through
> the material we present here, you will be well on your way to becoming
> a competent Asterisk solutions developer.
> 
> 
> We have also included appendices that will serve as excellent
> reference material, covering subjects such as application programming
> in C, configuration of various types of hardware, and many samples of
> configuration files. Also, there is a glossary included to help you
> find definitions for terms and acronyms used in this book.
> 
> So that's my proposal. Let me know what you think.

I think it's great.  I'm so happy about it, I'm going to check it into
CVS right now.  Thanks again for your contribution!

-Jared Smith