| Features |
Benefits |
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Industrial Strength
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LinkScan is an industrial-strength link checking and website management tool.
The LinkScan family of products delivers flexible test automation capabilities
for the entire spectrum of web based applications.
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Database Architecture
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Results of scans are stored in a database so that many, many
customizable queries and reports may be generated on demand.
The comprehensive reporting features
may be used to identify broken links and much more. For example,
SiteMaps, missing or poorly constructed document titles, orphaned
files, slow page load times etc.
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Management and Organizational Support
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LinkScan may be configured to reflect your organizations needs
and requirements. In addition to comprehensive management information,
databases and reports may be automatically created that reflect
the responsibilities of individual content developers and workgroups.
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Finds a Wide Variety of Problem Links
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Identifies and reports
almost 100 different types of problems categorized by severity.
The severity levels may be customized by the user.
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Extremely Fast and Scalable
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Quickly scans over 500,000 web pages. Can scan dozens of computers
in a single operation checking many links concurrently.
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Cross-Platform Portability -
LinkScan operates on all Microsoft Windows, Macintosh OS X and Unix
Systems. Microsoft Windows 95/98/ME, and Microsoft Windows NT 4.0/2000/2003/XP/Vista
are all fully supported. Compatible Unix systems include AIX, BSDI, FreeBSD,
Digital Unix, HP/UX, IRIX, all major Linux distributions, and SunOS/Solaris.
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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.
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Scans via File System and/or HTTP
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May be configured to navigate a website directly via the server
file system, or via a network and HTTP, or some combination of the
two. Enables optimum performance and test coverage.
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Smart Processing of Dynamic Content
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Sites with complex dynamic content including Active Server Pages (ASP),
Cold Fusion (CFM), Java Servlets (JSP), PHP, and Vignette may be scanned
to optimize test coverage and performance to more quickly identify key
problems.
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LinkScan Pinger™ periodically checks a
list of URL's and sends e-mail alarms if certain user defined error
conditions arise.
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In addition to generating alarms based on link status,
LinkScan Pinger™ may be
used to ensure the availability of back-end databases and other
services as well as the uptime of the basic network/webserver functions.
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LinkScan Profiler™ detects adult content
links or any other type of content
the user profiles.
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Enables webmasters and content managers to identify
pages with "inappropriate" (e.g. adult) content
linked to from their site so they can determine if they
wish to continue to link to a specific site.
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Supports the Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP)
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LinkScan will check http://... links to .rm files; extract the
rtsp://... and pnm://... links from those .rm files; then validate
the rtsp://... and pnm://... links.
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Supports the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) and
Wireless Markup Language (WML). |
This allows LinkScan to validate wireless
sites via an HTTP gateway. LinkScan includes the ability to specify a
User Agent header to be transmitted with each transaction. This means
it may be configured to masquerade as any arbitrary wireless device.
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LinkScan™ Recorder is a Windows application that interfaces
with Microsoft Internet Explorer. It may be used to capture real web
browsing sessions, such as a complex order entry sequence.
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Provides a powerful and convenient capabilities for the rapid and
comprehensive regression testing of complex transaction-based systems.
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Authentication Schemes
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Supports all major authentication schemes including those based on
HTTP authentication, proxy authentication and cookie-based arrangements.
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Supports Microsoft NTLM Authentication.
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LinkScan can test web servers that require proprietary Microsoft NTLM Authentication.
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JavaScript and Dynamic HTML (DHTML) features
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Extracts and validates links within JavaScript and DHTML code via
customizable pattern matching techniques to improve test coverage.
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ShockWave/Flash files
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LinkScan parses and extract any hyperlinks embedded in
ShockWave/Flash files.
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MIME/Content-Type -
LinkScan can save and store the MIME/Content-Type
associated with each internal link. |
Used to Detect server configuration problems.
These data are available via the Search
Documents and Changed Documents Reports.
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Full Range of Protocols
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Validates hyperlinks for all major protocols including HTTP:,
HTTPS: (proxy required on Unix systems), FTP:, MAILTO: and LDAP:.
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Forms and Drop-Down Lists
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Validates links within drop-down lists. May also be configured to
submit forms with user-specified input data using either the GET
or POST Methods.
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LinkScan has the ability to record the timing for each HTTP transaction.
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Transaction times are logged and can be used in performance related
studies.
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HTML Validation
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Identifies many common HTML syntax errors including <A HREF=...>
tags with no corresponding </A> tag, <IMG SRC> tags without
ALT, HEIGHT and/or WIDTH attributes, unprocessed Server Side Includes etc.
Also integrates with the highly regarded weblint software for
more comprehensive validation for cross-browser compatibility.
QuickCheck also integrates with either Open SP or
Jim Clark's SP program which means users may perform a full SGML
validation against a specific Document Type Definition (DTD).
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Orphaned Files and Stale Content
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Identifies Orphans (files that exist but never references) and other
stale content.
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Validates Imported Lists of Links
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Quickly checks lists of links exported from Relational Database
Management Systems and other applications software.
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Validates a list of documents
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Validates a list of documents, including all of the links within each document.
Such sequences may be generated with the LinkScan Recorder or derived from some other source.
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Exceptional Flexibility
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Most customization features use powerful Perl Regular Expressions
to provide virtually unlimited flexibility and extensibility.
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Add customized hyperlinks at various points throughout the reports.
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This provides a flexible means to integrate the LinkScan Reports
with other applications. For example, these links may be configured
to activate functions within a content management or other database
management system.
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Identify hidden errors. Some web servers are configured in a manner
that may mask serious errors from end users and link checkers alike.
This typically arises when the server responds to an invalid request
by delivering a user-friendly error page with a 200 OK status code
rather than a 404 Not Found.
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LinkScan provides for directives that may be used to force a 404
Not Found Error in these situations.
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Enhanced link status information displayed on the
LinkScan Reports. The LinkScan database includes an additional
extended status information field which is used to display supplementary
information about certain link types.
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It simply provides additional qualifying information regarding
the status of certain links.
Sometimes (mainly with mailto:, FTP, https://) links, there
is some explanatory text embedded within the protocol messages.
We try and capture this when possible/appropriate and include
in the database and reports.
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LinkScan WebServer
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LinkScan includes an extremely simple-to-configure webserver or
may be integrated with any existing webserver (e.g. Apache, Microsoft
IIS, Netscape Enterprise etc.)
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Scan multiple hosts or virtual hosts as a single website (LinkScan
Enterprise only)
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Users with distributed systems and web-farms can quickly and
conveniently assure the quality of complex websites and applications.
Application Service Providers and other sophisticated users with
mission-critical sites can take advantage of these features to
boost quality and productivity.
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Locking protection
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Multiple Projects may safely be scanned simultaneously. Any
attempt to scan a Project that is currently being scanned by another
user/process will be refused.
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| Features |
Benefits |
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Reports Generated from Database
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All LinkScan Reports are created on-demand from a database to
enable interactive and selective queries.
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Reports Linked to Each Other
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Whenever appropriate, each LinkScan Report is hyperlinked to
other LinkScan Reports for easy access to all the pertinent
information. Enables rapid investigation of issues through
simple and intuitive "drill-down" navigation.
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Reports Generated in Real-Time or Batch
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All LinkScan Reports are available interactively via a web browser
interface. They may also be created from the command-line or
batch scripts.
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Choice of Report Formats
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All LinkScan Reports may be created in a variety of formats
(Rich HTML, Standard HTML or Plain Text). Custom headers and
footers and other options available.
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Context-Sensitive Help
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Quickly get assistance.
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LinkScan QuickCheck
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LinkScan QuickCheck enables user to perform detailed analysis of
individual documents in real-time (e.g. to rapidly validate a document
during development or maintenance.
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Comprehensive Summary Statistics Report
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Provides invaluable management information regarding website quality
and trends.
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The Changed Document Report compares the summary data from
two different scans of the same website/project.
The report displays lists of new documents added,
documents removed and documents changed.
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Enhanced management information.
Work flow management - does the changed document report
correlate with the list of approved Change Requests?
QA - the changes report is useful as part of a Regression
Test. i.e. these things should be UNCHANGED.
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Problem Documents Report
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This report provides
a summary of documents which contain at least one broken link,
have missing Title tags, exceed a specified page weight, specified depth,
specified age, or specified size.
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E-mail Viewed Page. Allow users viewing any LinkScan Report
to send a copy of that report to a specified e-mail address.
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Improves the work flow, for example, as a supervisor is viewing
a report with some bad link(s), she could rapidly mail the
report to someone for action.
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Search Documents and Search Links Capabilities
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This reporting capability premits very arbitrary queries on the
database with a flexible array of sort/select/display options.
It makes virtually the entire database searchable.
This report has the ability to display documents that
use (or do not use) specific tag types (e.g. APPLET,
FORM, META, SCRIPT, etc).
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Depth of Scan Control
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Easily configure limits on the depth of a scan to the top level
directories which are presumably the most important pages.
Maxlevels controls the depth of the scan based on an examination
of the URL and the number of directory levels within it. The Maxclicks
command controls the depth of the scan based on the number of clicks
required to reach the link from the starting (home) page.
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Extract and Report Attributes
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The collected data may be post-processed by external programs to
carry out more complex transformations. Finally, some new reporting
options 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.
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White Space Report. Reports a summary of the White space-Bytes versus
Total-Bytes consumed during the course of a scan.
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Enable some users to significantly speed up a site, improve page load
times and save substantial amounts of bandwidth costs.
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