LinkScan 2.0 Released

Gardnerville, NV - March 20, 1997 - Electronic Software Publishing Corporation (Elsop) today announced the release of LinkScan 2.0. This release incorporates many new features and capabilities directed at maintaining the quality of very large intranet and internet web sites. A comment from a beta tester who is the webmaster of a major university website tells much of the story:

"We have approximately 45,000 pages totalling roughly 120,000 links (both internal and external). LinkScan 2.0 used about eight times less total virtual memory than LinkScan 1.1 and the run time was significantly reduced. We are talking about a third as much time to complete the job."

LinkScan's developers restructured the program to dramatically reduce the virtual memory requirements while scanning very large websites. Since the release of LinkScan 1.1, the scalability of LinkScan has been increased by an order of two magnitudes over other link checkers. A benchmark test proved that LinkScan can now check over 40,000 external URL's per hour running on a small (32 MB RAM) Pentium 90 Unix server.

Another beta tester, a webmaster at one of the world's largest computer manufacturers summed up his impression of LinkScan 2.0 in one word:

" *** Brilliant ***

I now have LinkScan 2.0 up and running and it is going through the site like greased lightning. I'm going to spend a few days 'playing' with the product to see if it does everything I want (or if I can break it :-)."

He hasn't "broken" it yet. And our developers added more features to make sure that LinkScan does everything users want. These include:

Improved Multi-Site Manager to simplify the testing of partial websites and or sub-sites. This makes it extremely easy to test part of a web site. This means, for example, that organizations with Intranet servers hosting hundreds of "Sections" maintained by different individuals can quickly scan specific selected Sections on the server.

We enhanced the support for proxy servers at the request of several customers with large internal networks and stringent security requirements. It gives the system administrators much more flexibility when integrating LinkScan into complex Intranet environments.

We also enhanced the LinkScan SiteMap/TapMap Customization features so that users can more easily and quickly create publication quality roadmaps of their sites. A LinkScan SiteMap greatly assist users in navigating their way around a large and/or complex website. It is also an excellent tool for webmasters to review the overall site design and structure and reveals inadequate or inaccurate page titles.

Other enhancements include the incorporation of a Target option to simplify the creation of SiteMaps and TapMaps in Frames and support for Redirector CGI's. The documentaion for LinkScan 2.0 has also been restructured to allow for rapid access to any section and quick reference to supporting information.

We are continuing to work with very large intranet and internet site developers in both large commercial and academic organizations to provide them with the best tools for maintaining the quality and integrity of their sites.

LinkScan is the only link checker that uses multi-threaded simultaneous processing. LinkScan also produces two revolutionary types of maps of websites. LinkScan's SiteMap enables the user to produce a site map that includes every link on a website arranged in a hierarchical format that resembles a book's table of contents. LinkScan's TapMap is an expandable and collapsible site map that allows viewers to tap down through the various and multiple levels of a website to quickly and easily navigate and explore the website by tapping on a few control icons.

For more details on the functions, features and benefits of LinkScan see our previous press release at this URL: http://www.elsop.com/pr19970122.html

Elsop's LinkScan reports and SiteMaps may be viewed using any of the standard Web browsers such as Netscape Navigator 1.2 and up, and Microsoft Internet Explorer on any platform including Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Macintosh, and, of course, Unix. LinkScan can be used by virtually anyone because it is designed to run on industry standard Unix and Microsoft Windows NT web servers.

About Electronic Software Publishing Corporation

Founded in January, 1997, privately-held Electronic Software Publishing Corporation is based in Gardnerville, Nevada. Elsop's mission is to provide the most advanced high-quality software for the maintenance, quality assurance and management of large scale intranet and internet websites.