Upgrade your Old Copy of LinkScan
Since LinkScan was introduced in January 1997, we have released more than 30 upgrades:
- Versions 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2
- Versions 2.0 and 2.1
- Versions 3.0, 3.1 and 3.2
- Versions 4.0, 4.1 and 4.2
- Versions 5.0, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4 and 5.5
- Versions 6.0 and 6.1
- Versions 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 and 7.4
- Versions 8.0, 8.1 and 8.2
- Versions 9.0
- Version 10.0
- Version 11.0, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3, 11.4, 11.5, 11.6 and 11.7
- Version 12.0, 12.1
The 4.0, 7.0 and 10.0 releases have been the only versions for which we have charged an upgrade fee. In each case, this fee was introduced simultaneously with a price increase in the basic product. The new prices reflected our continued investment in research and development and the value of the many enhancements we delivered to our customers with all the previous upgrades. During this period we also provided all requested support and assistance at no charge, consistent with our commitment to complete customer satisfaction. Please note that:
Customers with earlier LinkScan releases may download a free 15-day evaluation copy of LinkScan 12.x. This will not interfere with any existing production installation provided the new release is installed in a new, empty directory.
Reasons to Upgrade from LinkScan 6.x to 12.x
New Features and enhancements introduced into the LinkScan family of products with version 7.x, 8.x, 9.x, 10.x, 11.x and 12.x:- LinkScan Has Great New Graphical User Interface
LinkScan has always been the fastest, most scalable and flexible link checking
product available. With this upgrade release, LinkScan now has the best
Graphical User Interface (GUI) for Windows. This GUI is infinitely superior
to our previous one and any other product on the market. Included with the
GUI is a brand new, fully integrated and much improved web server,
browser, and Recorder. Now everything a user needs is in one convenient
and easy to use application.
- New Recorder
The new Recorder makes it much easier to capture cookies. It is also
much easier to push recorded data into LinkScan with a simple "Save" button.
- Ability to scan remote computers.
LinkScan ServerPro is limited to scanning 15,000 documents.
LinkScan Server is limited to scanning 5,000 documents and
the LinkScan Workstation is limited to scanning 500 documents.
- Page Load Time Report -
This reports ranks web pages on how long they take in seconds to download at a specified
connection speed. It can be used to identify pages that take too long to download which
causes visitors to leave your site.
- Javascript - We have enhanced LinkScan with support for JavaScript.
Links may be extracted from JavaScript code using
(customizable) pattern matching techniques.
- Forms - Users now can test specific forms with specified
data values. Forms may be submitted using either the GET
or POST methods.
- E-mail Address Verification - We now include our MailVet technology that
can verify with a high degree of accuracy that an e-mail address will or will not bounce mail when it is sent
from "mailto" tags.
MailVet does this without sending mail. This is not just a syntax checker. LinkScan will
verify up to 500 "mailto" tags. There is a MailVet demo at:
http://www.elsop.com/quick/mailvet.cgi - META tag owners - We have provided additional controls to specify document ownership.
In particular, owner names may be extracted from document META tags and subsequently manipulated via Regular
Expressions.
- Specify unlinked pages - We have added the capability to specify additional URL's
that must be scanned, whether or not LinkScan encounters
links to those URL's in other documents.
- ldap://... Links - We have added limited support for ldap://... links. LinkScan
will attempt to establish a connection to Port 389 of the
specified server. It does not currently validate the query
and the status will be reported as an Advisory; "LDAP Server
Connected - Query Not Checked".
- Secure Server Support - We have added additional support for SSL (https://) secure
server proxies. See Proxy Servers.
- Enhanced Regular Expressions - We have provided powerful facilities to manipulate specific links via Regular Expressions. This feature may, for example, be used to remove or manipulate SESSIONID's that are added dynamically by your HTTP server. It can also be helpful in controlling test conditions for sites that use mainly dynamic content.
Reasons to upgrade from releases 3.x and earlier versions to LinkScan 11.x include:
- Dramatic improvements to performance and scalability
- Many new features and greatly enhanced reporting capabilities
- Major new modules including LinkScan/Dispatch and LinkScan/QuickCheck
- Simplified system administration
- Numerous bug fixes and improved detection of (and recovery from) various exception conditions
- Year 2000 (Y2K) Compliance
More Details on New Features & Performance Enhancements
Performance
- The analysis of local HTML documents is processed approximately twice as fast.
- Virtual memory usage on large sites has been dramatically reduced. For example, in tests, we have scanned 20,000 document sites quite easily on a Pentium 90 processor with 32MB of RAM. On larger servers, LinkScan has processed several hundred thousand documents in a single scan.
- Many of the LinkScan Reports can be created significantly faster as a result of new database and indexing techniques.
New Features and Reports
- Validation of FTP links
- Limited validation of SSL (https) links
- Validation of mailto: links
- Validation of server-side imagemaps (as well as client-side)
- Support for HTTP/1.1
- Improved support for proxy servers (including proxy authentication)
- Many more reporting options (selection, sorting and formatting)
- Errors are reported by line number in the source document
- More customization of Reports, SiteMaps and Status Codes
New Modules
- Ability to define an "Owner" for each document in a website
- Ability to create Per-Owner LinkScan error reports
- Ability to send those reports to the respective owners via E-Mail
Dispatch
LinkScan/Dispatch was introduced with LinkScan Version 4.0. It is designed for operators of large websites where the responsibility for maintenance and updates is distributed among many individuals. It offers the:
The LinkScan/Dispatch facilities now enable senior management to monitor and manage the maintenance of documents and sites which are the responsibility of different webmasters and other individuals within their organization from a central location.
LinkScan/QuickCheck
Added convenience comes from a separate program supplied with LinkScan called QuickCheck. Following a full site scan, a user may decide to correct some errors in a few documents. QuickCheck enables the user to run a quick link validation on a single document (URL) to confirm that all of the errors were fixed and that no new errors were introduced in the revision process. LinkScan/QuickCheck may be run as a CGI script or from the command line.
QuickCheck integrates with Weblint
Detail reports include hyperlinks to LinkScan/QuickCheck which may be used to display all of the potential problems with a selected document. QuickCheck integrates with Weblint. Weblint performs rigorous HTML syntax checking of the source document. This optional feature may be used to show all of the HTML syntax errors and broken links in a single report together with the HTML source code. See the Weblint Home Page for more details on its HTML validation capabilities.
System Administration
- Simplified installation, configuration and maintenance
- Greatly improved documentation including separate User Guide, Installation Guide, Reference Manual and Quick Reference Card
- Access control features
- Several supporting utilities provided
Bugs
- A number of bugs (individually minor but collectively significant) have been corrected. These include corrections to the document parser, orphan detection and reporting modules.
- Error detection and recovery has been greatly improved especially with respect to the various operating system interfaces.
Year 2000
We have conducted a full source code audit and exhaustive testing to verify Y2K compliance when installed on a compliant platform.
Upgrade Now
Existing LinkScan customers may view complete listing of their upgrade options.