LinkScan 5.3 - Enhancements improve Website Administration and Control

San Jose, CA, March 11, 1999. Electronic Software Publishing Corporation (Elsop) introduces a number of new features in LinkScan version 5.3 that greatly enhance its power and flexibility in website management and the quality and performance of a website.

Website administrators may now monitor the progress of website maintenance through LinkScan's audit trail of site scans. Each execution of Linkscan creates a tab delimited file that contains key information that includes number of HTML documents scanned, missing and containing hard error. Number of non-HTML files scanned and missing are also included. A summary of anchors found and missing, number of orphaned files, and a variety of URL error conditions are also reported. This historical record may be imported into spreadsheets and other applications for management reports.

We have improved the processing of Server Side Include (SSI) tags when using File System navigation. SSI Include tags are fully expanded by LinkScan. SSI tags that require scripts to be executed (CGI/EXEC) are not processed. When using HTTP Navigation, all SSI's (including executables) are processed by the HTTP server.

LinkScan can now check your HTTP server access logs and include the per-document page impressions (hits) on the SiteMap reports. A summary of documents ranked by frequency of hits may be produced to aid the website administrator in determining which are the most important pages to fix first.

Linkscan has been enhanced to enable it to validate those sites that use Cookie based user authentication schemes. When scanning via HTTP, LinkScan can submit the required cookie to your server.

New commands have been added to LinkScan to provide finer control over which directories on your server should and should not be checked for orphaned files.

Other enhancements in this release include improving the treatment of path names containing non-standard (e.g. %encoded) characters, several cosmetic improvements to the SiteMap and TapMap reports, and checks to detect/correct several common configuration errors.

LinkScan provides the most benefits to administrators of very large internet and intranet websites. It is designed to provide management reports to multiple content managers and site maintainers simultaneously. LinkScan uses multi-threaded simultaneous processing which enables it to check external links at a rate in excess of 40,000 links per hour. A number of customers check sites in a single pass that have over a quarter of a million documents.

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, iafrica.com, Computer Associates, Candle Corp., the US National Security Agency, 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, Molecular Simulations Inc., 3Com Corporation, the Paris Chamber of Commerce and Ericsson.

LinkScan operates on all Unix Servers (including AIX, BSDI, FreeBSD, 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 5.3 may be downloaded (less than 300 Kbytes) from the company's website at: http://www.elsop.com/

LinkScan is priced at 750 US dollars. Version 5.3 is a free upgrade to purchasers of version 5.2, 5.1, 5.0, 4.2, 4.1 and 4.0.

ABOUT ELECTRONIC SOFTWARE PUBLISHING CORPORATION (Elsop)

Founded in January, 1997, privately-held Electronic Software Publishing Corporation's mission is to provide the most advanced high-quality software for quality assurance and management of internet/intranet websites. Elsop prides itself on providing very responsive and comprehensive customer support and assistance to prospects and customers alike.

EDITORIAL CONTACT

Kenneth R. Churilla
President
[email protected]
1-408-323-3030
Electronic Software Publishing Corporation
1361 Shelby Creek Court
San Jose, CA 95120