Funnel Web Profiler

Version 2.0

Release Notes

October 2001

© 2001 Quest Software Inc

Contents

Welcome to Funnel Web Profiler

System Requirements

Installing Funnel Web Profiler

What's new in this release

General Performance Notes

Issues and Limitations

For More Information ...

Welcome to Funnel Web Profiler

Funnel Web Profiler provides the analysis and editing tools necessary to effectively maintain and improve the quality of your Web site. Use Funnel Web Profiler to:

•  Quickly identify errors in HTML coding
  
•  Immediately identify and isolate design and implementation problems
  
•  Verify the quality of your Web site before going live
  
•  Completely understand the overall structure, content and navigation of your Web site
  

With powerful reporting features that cater to Webmasters, Web developers and other Web-related decision makers, Funnel Web Profiler is the one solution no serious Web site should be without.

System Requirements

You should verify that your system meets the following requirements before attempting to install and run Funnel Web Profiler.

Hardware Requirements

Software requirements

Installing Funnel Web Profiler

Running the Installation program

This procedure outlines how to install Funnel Web Profiler. The process should take only a few minutes to complete.

On all platforms, you must have System Administrator or Power User rights to install Profiler.

We recommend that you close all other applications before starting the installation. You can cancel the installation at any time by pressing the Esc key or by clicking the Cancel button.

By default, Funnel Web Profiler is installed into the following directory : C:\Program Files\Quest Software\Funnel Web Profiler. Note that the Java 2 Runtime Environment (JRE) Standard Edition Version 1.3 from SUN Microsystems is installed with Profiler.

To install Funnel Web Profiler

1. Download the Profiler setup program from the Internet.
2. Double-click the Profiler setup icon for the program to start the installation program.
3. Follow the instructions displayed on the screen. The setup program prompts you for the information required to complete the installation.

Upgrading from Funnel Web Profiler 1.0

If Funnel Web Profiler 1.0 is installed on your machine, you can install version 2.0 over the top. There is no need to perform an uninstall, just follow the steps listed in the To install Funnel Web Profiler section.

Licence information is retained. As some site data is lost during the upgrade, it is recommended that you rescan all sites. Site data and templates are updated with the following limitations:

• Upgraded templates (those supplied with Profiler) contain new advice items (217, 406 and 407). Templates previously created by you are not upgraded with the new advice.



• Basic templates are updated with newly supported versions of browsers.



• Info Maps and traffic data are lost during an upgrade.



• Forms data is lost during an upgrade.
  
  
• To follow secure links, rescan the site.

To run Funnel Web Profiler

Select Start > Programs > Quest Software > Funnel Web Profiler > Funnel Web Profiler 2.0. (This assumes you have selected the default Program Manager group during the installation.)

Profiler needs access to change TCP/IP settings during a scan. On Windows NT and Windows 2000 platforms, this means you must have Administrator access when running Profiler. For Windows 98, consult the System Policy put in place by the Network Administrator. If necessary, contact your Network Administrator and ask to have access to change TCP/IP settings.

To uninstall Funnel Web Profiler

Select Start > Programs > Funnel Web Profiler > Uninstall Funnel Web Profiler 2.0. (This assumes you have selected the default Program Manager group during the installation.) The Uninstall Funnel Web Profiler Wizard guides you through the Uninstall process.

In the "Select Uninstall Method", choose Automatic as your uninstall method. Do not select the Custom or Repair options. These options are not supported.

Reboot your computer after the uninstallation process has completed. The program will not normally prompt you to do so, but this should still be done, otherwise subsequent installations of Funnel Web Profiler may not work correctly.

Downloading Upgrades from the Internet

From time to time, Quest Software may make upgrades and patches available on the Internet. Upgrades will be made available from the Quest Software Web site at www.quest.com. Instructions for downloading and installing upgrades are provided on the Web site.

What's new in this release

In this release, we have added many functional and usability enhancements to Profiler. The following are the main new features.

The Profile Tab

The new Profile tab displays an at-a-glance management summary of your site. This one page management summary displays:

• Overall rating of your site, trended over time. That is, you can easily see if the quality of your site is improving.
• Most serious problems with your site
• Most common broken-link problem
• Browser compatibility problems likely to be encountered
• A summary of the traffic through your site, including most common pages visited, entry points and exit points (where you have integrated with Funnel Web Analyzer)

Batch Scheduling of Scans (Professional Edition)

You can now schedule automatic scanning of your site at a specific time of day. For example, you could schedule a scan to occur every night at midnight; then view the Profile tab the next morning to check that no new major problems have occurred.

Site Mapping Enhancements

Many feature and usability improvements have been made to the Web Map and Information Maps. In particular:

• Improved zooming and panning of the Web Map
• New web map overlays showing page age (that is, stale pages), site entries and exits and visit duration (when used in conjunction with Funnel Web Analyzer)
• Information maps now include an on-line tutorial, to assist in understanding and using the information displayed

Secure Site Scanning

HTTPS (Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol) pages are now scanned and analyzed by Profiler.

If your site is protected via HTTP or Proxy authentication, Profiler now allows you to provide a user name and password to give Profiler entry to the site for scanning.

Comprehensive Search Mechanisms

Where sites have many thousands of items, it can be a challenge to locate particular pages for further detailed analysis. Profiler 2.0 comes with a comprehensive search mechanism, allowing you to find pages that have particular attributes. For example, you can look for items based on:

• text in the URL or page title
• item content (for example, find all items referring to "Purchase")

If you purchase the Professional Edition, you can perform further sophisticated searches, based on combinations of:

• item type (for example, find all Gopher pages)
• item attributes (for example, find all secure pages)
• item size
• page quality
• item modification date (for example, find all pages modified within last 7 days)

Improved Forms Handling

A Form Submission Editor is provided so that you can submit form information in an intuitive fashion, based on the HTML code that drives the form. Form submission via GET and POST protocols are supported, including using the HTTPS protocol.

You can also control whether or not to have Profiler make a form submission, based on a variety of criteria.

Improved Cookie Support

You can now control whether Profiler will accept or reject cookies, either over the whole site, or on a cookie-by-cookie basis.

Upload code changes via FTP (Professional Edition)

Profiler (Professional Edition) allows you to directly edit the HTML code of your web site. A feature has been added to the HTML editor that allows you to upload your changes via FTP directly to the web server. This makes it easy to test changes that you have made based on Profiler's advice

General Performance Notes

Scripting

JavaScript and other client-side scripting languages are not supported. In particular, this means:

• Pages that are generated using client-side JavaScript will not be scanned as you might expect.
• Links and redirections that rely on JavaScript will not be followed by Funnel Web Profiler.
• Cookies set via Javascript will not be set. We suggest using server-side cookies instead.

In all cases, Profiler behaves as would a browser without JavaScript support.

Flash

Links within Flash .SWF files are not analyzed or followed.

Redirections

Redirections from POST form submissions (accessed via the Forms tab in Goal Settings) are not supported.

Scanning

If Profiler runs out of memory during a scan, the site scan may become corrupted. Increase the amount of memory available and then rescan the site.

Funnel Web Profiler is unable to determine whether a URL such as http://www.company.com refers to the same file as http://www.company.com/index.html. If your site uses both types of URL, you may therefore see two entries for what you know to be the same file.

Profiler looks for keywords in html files only.

Multiword keywords (for example, 'Funnel Web Profiler') are currently split into individual words, which are treated individually (e.g.  'Funnel', 'Web'  and 'Profiler').

Only files that return a MIME type of 'text/html' are supported, for example, plain text, RTF and Word documents will not have keywords picked up, or be analyzed for errors.

Profiler scans sites in several stages. If an item is available during the first stage, but not during a later stage, the information displayed for that item may be inconsistent. For example, a page that is available during the first stage, but not later, may be reported as a broken page, with links to other pages.  This scenario will not occur if caching is turned on.  

Similarly, if the contents of an HTML page differs between the first and later stages of a site scan, then Profiler's analysis of that page may not be accurate.  Turning local caching on will resolve this issue.

Profiler conforms to standards by identifying itself correctly to web servers. If you are trying to scan a Web site that has been set up to only accept requests from a limited number of browsers, then Profiler may not be able to access the site even though you can see the site correctly in your browser. Under these circumstances you can make Profiler pretend it is a specific browser by altering the user-agent name in the General section of the Options.

Profiler now follows 'moved permanently' (HTTP code 301) responses (version 1.0 did not do this), and will generate advice code 408 against such redirections.

Help

Help and advice files are displayed using the default application for HTML files. Where Internet Explorer is used, in some cases, the application will be run but the display is minimized. In this situation, you need to manually restore the display in order to view it.

Miscellaneous

Profiler cannot access or write to drives specified using the UNC notation (e.g. \\server\dir). Map the UNC name to a drive letter and use the drive letter (for example, m:)   to specify the drive.

Advanced configuration

Funnel Web Analyzer

Issues and Limitations

• Funnel Web Profiler supports the basic and digest mechanisms for HTTP authentication. If the web site (or proxy server) you are trying to authenticate to does not support either of these, then you will not be prompted for login details, and Profiler will fail to connect to the site.



• The Profiler uninstall executable (unwise.exe) may delete itself when you restart your computer - this occurs if a re-install has been performed after an uninstall without a reboot inbetween. This problem manifests itself when trying to use the Uninstall FWP option within the FWP program group. In this situation, you are advised to manually remove FWP by deleting the Funnel Web Profiler folder within the Quest Software folder of your Program Files folder (if you chose a non-default location when installing FWP, delete the corresponding folder). All associated shortcuts to Funnel Web Profiler should also be deleted.



• There is an intermittent problem with the Page Properties dialog when running Profiler on Windows 98. In some cases, you will be unable to focus on the dialog and therefore will not be able to close it. To close the dialog, restart Profiler.



• Logging on to a proxy server via a configuration script is not supported.



• When the scan reaches 100%, Funnel Web Profiler may appear to hang. It is still working, please wait a few minutes for the confirmation message.
  
  
• With some printer drivers, the appearance of graphical printouts (web maps, info maps and statistical graphs) can be incomplete or of low quality in certain circumstances.

For More Information ...

Other Document Sources

The Quest web site also contains an up-to-date FAQ. Go to http://www.quest.com/funnel_web/profiler/tech.asp to access this FAQ.

Contacting Quest Software