$Id$


                Welcome to Kamailio v4.0!

                http://www.kamailio.org/
                ==========================

I.   About Kamailio
II.  Feature List
III. Getting started
IV.  About the project
V.   Obtaining Help
VI.  More Information


Kamailio is an industrial-strength, free server for realtime communication,
based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP RFC3261). 

It is engineered to power Realtime Communications such as IP telephony and presence 
infrastructures up to large scale. With embedded support for WebSockets, HTTP,
MSRP and XMLrpc as well as Json-rpc it's a modern server, up to date with current
standards.

Kamailio keeps track of users, sets up multimedia sessions, relays instant 
messages and creates space for new plug-in applications. Its proven interoperability 
guarantees seamless integration with components from other vendors, eliminating the 
risk of a single-vendor trap. Kamailio has successfully participated in various 
interoperability tests in which it worked with the products 
of other leading SIP vendors.

The Kamailio software enables a flexible plug-in model for new applications: Third parties 
can easily link their plug-ins with the server code and provide thereby advanced and
customized services. With a modern RPC interface, 3rd party application can integrate
and interact with services provided by Kamailio.

Kamailio's performance and robustness allows it to serve millions of users and accommodate needs
of very large operators. With a low-cost dual-CPU, the Kamailio server is able to power 
IP telephony services in an area as large as the Bay Area during peak hours.

The Kamailio server is extremely configurable to allow the creation of various routing and 
admission policies as well as setting up new and customized services. Its configurability 
allows it to serve many roles: network security barrier, presence server, application server, 
IMS server or PSTN gateway guard (Session Border Controller) for example.


II. Feature List
================

Please visit http://www.kamailio.org/ for the most up-to-date feature list.
Note that as features easily are added as modules, changes can occur quickly.

Most of Kamailio's features are implemented as plug-in modules. See 
our web site for a current list.

III. Getting started
====================

The INSTALL document will guide you through the installation.

Kamailio is composed of a core and additional modules. For each module
there is a README with documentation on how to configure and use the 
module. These are available in each modules source code directory as well
as on the kamailio.org web site.

We recommend that you continue with reading README-MODULES and then the
document named INSTALL.

IV. About kamailio.org
========================

The Kamailio project has roots in a line of projects starting with SIP Express
Router, then OpenSER and now Kamailio. A merge project was started during the fall
of 2008 by developers from the OpenSER project, recently renamed to Kamailio.org
and SIP Express Router (SER) from iptel.org. 

Kamailio is the result of a merge of the code base and years of experience from
both developer teams. In release 4.0, during the spring of 2013, the
merger of the products was completed and a unified product was released.

See http://www.sip-router.org/ for the story of SER, OpenSER/Kamailio and kamailio.org.

V. Obtaining Help
=================

We offer best-effort free support for Kamailio. "best-effort" means 
that we try to solve your problems via email as soon as we can, 
subject to available manpower. 

To receive feedback to your inquiries, we recommend you to subscribe 
to the sr-users mailing list and post your queries there. This mailing 
list is set up for mutual help by the community of Kamailio users and developers. 
To participate in the mailing list, subscribe at the following web address: 
         http://lists.sip-router.org/mailman/listinfo/sr-users

VI. More Information
====================

Most up-to-date information is always available at our website,
                 http://www.kamailio.org/

Particularly, it includes:
- administrator's guide
- configuration cookbooks (core, pseudovariables and transformations)
- module documentation
- installation guidelines (INSTALL)
- download links
- etc.
