LinkScan 9.0 Scans Wireless WebSites & Monitors Content
San Jose, CA, December 4, 2001. Electronic Software Publishing Corp. (Elsop) is pleased to announce the release of LinkScan™ 9.0.
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.LinkScan was, from the outset, designed as an open and extensible system. Customers need not discard and write off their existing investments in content management and other tools. LinkScan fits right in and may be integrated with those systems to save time and money as well as maintain website quality to highly enhance the user experience. Existing customers are today using LinkScan with other leading systems such as those from Microsoft, Vignette, Broadvision, Sun Microsystems and IBM.
The new 9.0 release has a host of new and powerful features Which include:
LinkScan Profiler detects Adult Content Links
Webmasters are seeing a new and increasing problem with their external links. They are finding that working (200 OK) links are suddenly pointing at pages with "inappropriate" (e.g. adult) content. This has become quite an issue with large numbers of domains changing hands or, in some cases, being hijacked through exploits in the Internet Domain Name System (DNS).Therefore, LinkScan has been enhanced with a range of special profiling techniques that may be used to automate the detection of these situations without the need to manually inspect each link on a periodic basis. The profiling options include user written profiles, pre-configured profiles available on request from Elsop, and integration with third party content filtering products and services such as firewalls and proxies.
LinkScan does not censor or exercise editorial control over these links. It merely identifies them so that the webmaster can determine if he wishes to continue to link to a specific site. LinkScan Profiler can be used to identify links to any type of content the user desires. [Not available in LinkScan Workstation]
WAP and WML Support
LinkScan now supports the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) and Wireless Markup Language (WML). This allows LinkScan to validate wireless sites via an HTTP gateway. LinkScan includes the ability to specify a User Agent header to be transmitted with each transaction. This means it may be configured to masquerade as any arbitrary wireless device.Problem Documents Report
A new Problem Documents Report has been created. This report provides a summary of documents which contain at least one broken link, have missing Title tags, exceed a specified page weight, specified depth, specified age, or specified size.Enhanced LinkScan Dispatch
LinkScan Dispatch has been greatly enhanced. It now includes options to create and/or e-mail a range of different reports. LinkScan Dispatch supports a completely new series of command-line switches.Depth of Scan Control
A new method for controlling the depth of a scan has been implimented. The new Maxclicks command complements the existing Maxlevels command. Whereas Maxlevels controls the depth of the scan based on an examination of the URL and the number of directory levels within it, the new Maxclicks command controls the depth of the scan based on the number of clicks required to reach the link from the starting (home) page.Ease of Use Improvements
To improve ease of use, we have renamed and reorganized some reports and provided more context-sensitive help. We have made numerous other small changes and enhancements to the LinkScan reports.MIME/Content-Type
LinkScan can now save and store the MIME/Content-Type associated with each internal link. These data are available via the Search Documents and Changed Documents Reports.GUI Enhanced
The Windows Graphical User Interface has been enhanced to provide more control over the "scope" of a scan based on the Onlyinclude and Onlyfollow commands.New Status Codes and Commands
Several new Status Codes have been added. Errors generated via the Errordoc (redirect match) command are displayed with the 3000 Status Code to differentiate them from regular 404's. Similarly, errors generated via the Errorbody (body match) command are displayed with the 3001 Status Code. The Excludecookie command has been created to filter/reject specific cookies. The Proxymatch command has been created to provide more flexibility for those with complex network environments that require the use of different proxy servers for different hosts/domains.Version 9.0 is a free upgrade to all users of 7.0 or higher. Existing users and others interested in the technical details of the new features are invited to visit:
http://www.elsop.com/linkscan/history.html
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 organizations in particular, this also means direct cost savings in deployment, user training and system administration.
LinkScan operates on all Unix Systems (including AIX, BSDI, FreeBSD, Digital Unix, HP/UX, IRIX, all major Linux distributions, SunOS/Solaris, and Microsoft Windows (95/98/ME and NT 4.0/2000/XP) platforms.