Installation will put in place all the components necessary to get Site Server up and running. Within a few minutes and with minimal interactions during installation, we were already pointing the Content Analyzer at our test Web site. Its performance was average, and it was a little slower overall than the other, standalone Web analyzers.

The Content Analyzer's interface includes a hyperbolic view of the Web site that rotates the highlighted URL in the foreground as you choose URLs. An analysis window listing the top-level URLs, a properties tab containing all the children of the highlighted link, and a browser window all show information about the selected URL. Site Server's main application interface makes more information immediately available to the administrator than that of Astra SiteManager, WebTrends, WebChallenger and Linkbot Pro.

Customizable Reports It took just a few clicks for Site Server to create a report using all the data it had gathered. But its report was rather bland and verbose compared to reports generated by WebTrends, Linkbot Pro and WebChallenger. Site Server's strength is its ability to let you create your own database queries and augment the report format. You can customize the reports' look and feel using the Report Writer, and remove or add information. Aside from the style changes available in WebTrends, no other product allows such control over the report format. Additional data, such as Internet Domain, can be brought into the Site Server database with the Custom Import feature and used in subsequent reports without much more than a basic understanding of database queries. Usage Import integrates log-file data into the database for even more data-filled reports.

Overall, Site Server provides the strongest reporting features and options of the products we tested. It's disappointing that it isn't easier to use right off the bat.

Mercury Interactive Corp. Astra SiteManager 1.01.1
Astra SiteManager's visual representation of your Web site--complete with internal/external links and content-based icons--is a unique approach, but it doesn't provide enough worthwhile information. It also includes a feature called dynamic scanning, which lets you scan a Web site using a data set for each form; editing support for local content; and a change viewer feature, which shows how your Web site has changed from scan to scan. The interface may be attractive enough for some network managers, but WebTrends and Linkbot Pro provide you with more information regarding your site.

Eager to take advantage of the visual Web display, we created a "map" of our test site and analyzed the links. To our dismay, we were unable to scan the site in its entirety with our base system. Mercury's tech support staff informed us that Astra SiteManager was limited to the amount of physical memory present on the Astra SiteManager system. We encountered similar problems with WebTrends, Linkbot Pro, Site Server and WebChallenger.

Moving to a more powerful machine, we were able to perform the link analysis. Astra SiteManager product managers have said that the next revision should fix this memory problem by using the local file system for storage during the scan and perform better on systems that have smaller amounts of RAM.

Astra SiteManager does little more than crawl along your Web site and display URL information. As with Linkbot Pro, we were able to view the URLs as a formatted list; compared to WebTrends, Linkbot Pro and WebChallenger, Astra SiteManager provides little in the way of reports and useful information. Using up to 21 filters, we could view the finished scan in segments. Images, HTML files, other services such as "mailto," "news" and "ftp" URLs, external links, broken links, and sound and video links can be filtered on the fly. On larger sites, you'll notice a long delay when applying the filters for the display to be redrawn, but that is only to be expected.

Charting Changes Astra SiteManager's unique Change Viewer also lets you look at the changes from map to map. This is particularly useful for zeroing in on changed Web-site content after the initial map. Its dynamic scan capability lets you define individual data sets for each form on the Web site, so you can scan through forms and retrieve relevant information using the static form inputs you provide. Enabling the dynamic scan feature creates the data sets by letting you fill in the form inputs once, and reuse the form data or data set for future scans. Although this process takes time for sites that have a number of forms, it does provide control over the form inputs beyond the form's default.

Maps can be saved individually and compared later independent of when they were made. So no matter when you scan a Web site it can later be used in compiling a changed view or new view.