LinkScan 5.0 - Breakthroughs in Performance, Scalability & Workflow
San Jose, CA, Sept. 10, 1998. Electronic Software Publishing Corporation (Elsop) released LinkScan 5.0 today. Major improvements have been made to LinkScan 5.0 to make it serve the needs of workgroups throughout the enterprise and facilitate the workflow between content managers, developers and systems administrators. These improvements are the result of radical design changes that make version 5.0 essentially a new product compared to earlier versions. This effort was energized by the needs of organizations with very large intranet websites and public websites.
Benchmarks prove that the new LinkScan checks internal links twice as fast as earlier versions. This performance boost compliments the extraordinary and incomparable speed with which it has always scanned external links. LinkScan employs multi- threaded simultaneous processing that can check over 30 links concurrently.
With the explosive growth of web based applications, managers must be concerned about the scalability of their applications and tools. Many link validating programs have severe scalability problems that cause them to run slow, slow down, or simply crash when attempting to negotiate large websites. Elsop has eliminated those limitations with a server-based architecture that minimizes the use of virtual memory and other system resources. Depending on the site size, the latest version of LinkScan will use from fifty to eighty percent less virtual memory than prior releases and other products.
LinkScan serves workgroups better through a new scheme of Projects, Owners and Usernames. LinkScan now creates separate databases for each content manager and/or workgroup. This facilitates user-selective queries and greatly improves response. These databases also give users (content managers) a cleaner workspace by hiding everything else from their view. Security features enable system administrators to control access to the workgroup space by username.
Numerous other enhancements have been added to support the efficiency of operation among workgroups throughout the enterprise. These include: revised and improved data structures, better means of reporting orphan files, an enhanced "All Pages Linking To...Report", more control over sorting and selection options, greater facilities for including/excluding specific references, more customization capability of the Menu's and Reports, numerous new formatting options to serve diverse output devices, and more powerful command line reporting options.
New features include a handy Quick Reference Card with HTML links to all key information, the ability to relocate documentation and images to any directory on one's server, and local control of Help and Status Code hyperlinks on reports to integrate with local site-specific documentation. SiteMaps and TapMaps may now be defined based on directory structure as well as link order.
LinkScan is being used by such large and diverse organizations as Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, NEC, Silicon Graphics, the University of Cambridge (UK), the United States Department of Defense, Goethe-Institut, the California Institute of Technology, StorageTek, HBO,Shell Canada, Australia's Commonwealth Department of the Environment, Rueters, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwest Airlines, Brown University, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the MITRE Corporation, the Ford Motor Company, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Walgreens Pharmacy, the Boeing Company, Business Week, the Swedish EPA, and Molecular Simulations Inc.
LinkScan operates on all Unix Servers (including AIX, BSD, Digital Unix, HP/UX, IRIX, Linux, and SunOS/Solaris flavors) and Windows NT 4.0 servers with Perl 5. Free fully functional evaluation copies of LinkScan 5.0 may be downloaded (less than 300 Kbytes) from the company's website at: http://www.elsop.com/linkscan/dleval.cgi
LinkScan 5.0 is priced at 750 US dollars. Version 5.0 is a free upgrade to purchasers of version 4.0, 4.1 and 4.2. Upgrades from versions earlier than 4.0 may be purchased for 250 US dollars. Volume discounts are available in single order quantities of five copies or more. Orders may be placed online via a secure server. Visa, MasterCard, and American Express cards are accepted in addition to payment by check or money order.