LinkScan™ 11.1 Has Powerful New Features
San Jose, CA, March 11, 2003. Electronic Software Publishing Corp. (Elsop) is pleased to announce the release of LinkScan(tm) 11.1 with a variety of new features and capabilities.
The most noteworthy addition is LinkScan Pinger which is a self-contained utility that may be used to periodically check a list of URL's and send e-mail alarms if certain user defined error conditions arise.
On each pass, the LinkScan Pinger will access each of the supplied URL's and log the results to a simple text file. Optionally, it may be configured to send e-mail alarms to one of more addresses if certain error thresholds are exceeded. In addition to generating alarms based on link status, the LinkScan Pinger may also be configured such that the document body for a given URL *must contain* (or must not contain) a specific string/expression. This means the Pinger may be used to ensure the availability of back-end databases and other services as well as the uptime of the basic network/webserver functions.
LinkScan now has the ability to record the timing for each HTTP transaction. This means LinkScan may be used in performance related studies. The transaction times are logged to a simple tab-delimited ASCII file which may easily be imported directly into Microsoft Excel (or other tools) for further analysis.
Support for the Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) has been added. The software will check http://... links to .rm files; extract the rtsp://... and pnm://... links from those .rm files; then validate the rtsp://... and pnm://... links.
Support for Japanese character sets have been significantly improved. When scanning sites that contain (in whole or in part) Japanese pages, include certain directives that will convert pages containing JIS, Shift-JIS and/or EUC-JP encoded Japanese characters to normalized EUC-JP. This means, for example, that the TITLE tags extracted from different documents may be combined in a single summary document (e.g. the LinkScan SiteMap) even though the original pages were constructed with different encodings.
LinkScan now supports the <NOINDEX> tags. The <NOINDEX> tag is supported by various search engines and is typically used to prevent the indexing of document fragments that are used repeatedly (e.g. site navigation menus/tools). Excluding these regions from LinkScan and search engine indexes helps users and authors focus their attention on the most critical content.
We have added an option that will permit LinkScan to test web servers that require proprietary Microsoft NTLM Authentication. LinkScan includes native support for HTTP Basic Authentication. However, some Intranet environments utilize the proprietary and undocumented Microsoft NTLM protocol to authenticate users.
Major performance improvements have been made to the LinkScan Profiler. We have also improved the formatting of the System Configuration Report, Cookie Log/Diagnostic Trace to improve usability. We have enhanced and improved the layout of the directory-order SiteMap to improve the visualization of the website structure. We have made several adjustments to the LinkScan general purpose Text File Parser. In general LinkScan will extract more hyperlinks from text files, Microsoft Office documents and similar file types with fewer false matches.
The LinkScan(tm) 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. Existing customers are today using LinkScan with other leading systems such as those from Microsoft, Vignette, Broadvision, Sun Microsystems and IBM.
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 Microsoft Windows, Macintosh OS X and Unix Systems. Microsoft Windows 95/98/ME and NT 4.0/2000/XP are all fully supported. Compatible Unix systems include AIX, BSDI, FreeBSD, Digital Unix, HP/UX, IRIX, all major Linux distributions, and SunOS/Solaris.
Version 11.1 is a free upgrade to users of version 10.0 and 11.0.
Free fully functional evaluation copies of LinkScan 11.1 may be downloaded from the company's website at: