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Major Enhancements Added to LinkScan™ 8.2
San Jose, CA, September 18, 2001. Electronic Software Publishing Corp.
(Elsop) is pleased to announce the release of LinkScan™ 8.2.
The LinkScan™ family of products deliver industrial-strength test
automation and website management capabilities. In addition to
extremely high accuracy, LinkScan offers exceptional performance
and scalability for extremely large websites and Intranet applications.
Advanced customization features allow webmasters and quality assurance
engineers to create completely automated test suites.
In LinkScan 8.2 we have consolidated a large number of customer
generated suggestions for improvements and enhancements. We thank
all of those users who contributed suggestions. Some of the highlights
include:
Added a new Changed Document Report. This allows users to compare
the summary data from two different scans of the same website or project.
The report displays lists of new documents added, documents removed
and documents changed. Document changes are detected based on one or
more of the following data items: document size, document title,
document date/time modified (if available) and/or additional user
specified data collected from META tags as described below. Benefits
include:
- Enhanced management information.
- Work flow management -- verify that changes correlate with
approved Change Requests.
- Quality Assurance -- provide reports to support Regression Testing.
Added an option which, when enabled, will allow users viewing any
LinkScan Report to send a copy of that report to a specified e-mail
address, in HTML or TEXT format. This improves work flow; for example,
a supervisor viewing a report of bad link(s) may rapidly mail it to
someone else for action.
Added two new reporting capabilities through search forms that
enable users to Search Documents and Search Links. These may be used
to perform arbitrary ad hoc queries on the LinkScan Database with a
flexible array of sort/select/display options. For example, one might
use such a query to produce a report listing every document that
contains one or more <FORM> tags. Other examples of queries
that can be made include:
- Show all documents that contain JavaScript
- Show all documents that contain this string in the TITLE
- Show all documents that contain forms -- driven by privacy
concerns -- where might personal information be collected?
- Show all documents that expire in the next week (based on
META tag information)
This reporting capability permits very arbitrary queries on the
database. It makes virtually the entire database searchable.
Added a new control (Maxlevels) that may be used to more easily
configure limits on the depth of a scan. This is now a quick and
easy way to limit the scan to the top level directories which are
typically the most important pages.
Added the ability to collect additional user specified data from each
document scanned. Typically this is used to extract document attributes from
META tags although the feature is not limited to META data. The data may
also be manipulated via Perl Regular Expressions prior to storage in the
LinkScan database (e.g. to normalize formatting). The collected data may
also be post-processed by external programs to carry out more complex
transformations. New reporting options (described above) may
be used to search/sort/select on those fields. User data collected could
include the name of a person responsible for a document or an expiration
date by which a document must be reviewed or updated. This feature enables
the user to integrate LinkScan with their work flow tools and procedures.
We have noticed that a significant proportion of web pages include vast
amounts of totally redundant, bandwidth-consuming white space. In our view,
many website operators have an opportunity to improve page load times and
reduce their bandwidth cost. We have, therefore, enhanced LinkScan to report
a summary of the White space-Bytes versus Total-Bytes consumed during the
course of a scan.
Added a summary of inline image data to the LinkScan QuickCheck reports.
This report now displays almost everything that LinkScan knows about a
given document.
Introduced an option (Maxext) to include external links on the LinkScan
SiteMap and TapMap.
Enhanced the low-level HTTP and HTTPS drivers for improved
accuracy and greater performance. In particular, we have incorporated
some improved time out/retry algorithms to enhance accuracy and
throughput on slower links. The handling of DNS timeouts has also
been improved.
Incorporated several improvements to the HTML and JavaScript parsers
increasing the accuracy of link discovery in JavaScript. These should
benefit all users but the enhancements are especially significant on
sites using IBM's Lotus Domino.
Rewritten the Portable Document Format (PDF) drivers for improved
accuracy and performance and to better handle the latest versions
of the PDF file formats.
Enhanced our MailVet™ technology to improve the speed and accuracy
of the LinkScan active mailto: checking.
Improved the speed at which all of the LinkScan reports are generated.
LinkScan Version 8.2 is a free upgrade to all users of 7.0 or higher.
The LinkScan family of products addresses the complete spectrum of
needs at affordable prices ranging from $300 to $5,000. Cross-platform
and cross-product compatibility provides seamless migration for
rapidly growing organizations while protecting all existing
investments. For larger companies in particular, this also means
direct cost savings in deployment, user training and system
administration. To view a partial list of LinkScan users see:
LinkScan operates on all Unix Systems (including AIX, BSDI, FreeBSD,
Digital Unix, HP/UX, IRIX, Linux, and SunOS/Solaris flavors), and
Microsoft Windows (95/98/NT/2000) platforms.
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