Major Enhancements Added to LinkScan 8.2
San Jose, CA, September 18, 2001. Electronic Software Publishing Corp. (Elsop) is pleased to announce the release of LinkScan™ 8.2.
The LinkScan™ family of products deliver industrial-strength test automation and website management capabilities. In addition to extremely high accuracy, LinkScan offers exceptional performance and scalability for extremely large websites and Intranet applications. Advanced customization features allow webmasters and quality assurance engineers to create completely automated test suites.
In LinkScan 8.2 we have consolidated a large number of customer generated suggestions for improvements and enhancements. We thank all of those users who contributed suggestions. Some of the highlights include:
Added a new Changed Document Report. This allows users to compare the summary data from two different scans of the same website or project. The report displays lists of new documents added, documents removed and documents changed. Document changes are detected based on one or more of the following data items: document size, document title, document date/time modified (if available) and/or additional user specified data collected from META tags as described below. Benefits include:
- Enhanced management information.
- Work flow management -- verify that changes correlate with approved Change Requests.
- Quality Assurance -- provide reports to support Regression Testing.
Added an option which, when enabled, will allow users viewing any LinkScan Report to send a copy of that report to a specified e-mail address, in HTML or TEXT format. This improves work flow; for example, a supervisor viewing a report of bad link(s) may rapidly mail it to someone else for action.
Added two new reporting capabilities through search forms that enable users to Search Documents and Search Links. These may be used to perform arbitrary ad hoc queries on the LinkScan Database with a flexible array of sort/select/display options. For example, one might use such a query to produce a report listing every document that contains one or more <FORM> tags. Other examples of queries that can be made include:
- Show all documents that contain JavaScript
- Show all documents that contain this string in the TITLE
- Show all documents that contain forms -- driven by privacy concerns -- where might personal information be collected?
- Show all documents that expire in the next week (based on META tag information)
This reporting capability permits very arbitrary queries on the database. It makes virtually the entire database searchable.
Added a new control (Maxlevels) that may be used to more easily configure limits on the depth of a scan. This is now a quick and easy way to limit the scan to the top level directories which are typically the most important pages.
Added the ability to collect additional user specified data from each document scanned. Typically this is used to extract document attributes from META tags although the feature is not limited to META data. The data may also be manipulated via Perl Regular Expressions prior to storage in the LinkScan database (e.g. to normalize formatting). The collected data may also be post-processed by external programs to carry out more complex transformations. New reporting options (described above) 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.
We have noticed that a significant proportion of web pages include vast amounts of totally redundant, bandwidth-consuming white space. In our view, many website operators have an opportunity to improve page load times and reduce their bandwidth cost. We have, therefore, enhanced LinkScan to report a summary of the White space-Bytes versus Total-Bytes consumed during the course of a scan.
Added a summary of inline image data to the LinkScan QuickCheck reports. This report now displays almost everything that LinkScan knows about a given document.
Introduced an option (Maxext) to include external links on the LinkScan SiteMap and TapMap.
Enhanced the low-level HTTP and HTTPS drivers for improved accuracy and greater performance. In particular, we have incorporated some improved time out/retry algorithms to enhance accuracy and throughput on slower links. The handling of DNS timeouts has also been improved.
Incorporated several improvements to the HTML and JavaScript parsers increasing the accuracy of link discovery in JavaScript. These should benefit all users but the enhancements are especially significant on sites using IBM's Lotus Domino.
Rewritten the Portable Document Format (PDF) drivers for improved accuracy and performance and to better handle the latest versions of the PDF file formats.
Enhanced our MailVet™ technology to improve the speed and accuracy of the LinkScan active mailto: checking.
Improved the speed at which all of the LinkScan reports are generated.
LinkScan Version 8.2 is a free upgrade to all users of 7.0 or higher.
The LinkScan family of products addresses the complete spectrum of needs at affordable prices ranging from $300 to $5,000. 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. To view a partial list of LinkScan users see:
LinkScan operates on all Unix Systems (including AIX, BSDI, FreeBSD, Digital Unix, HP/UX, IRIX, Linux, and SunOS/Solaris flavors), and Microsoft Windows (95/98/NT/2000) platforms.