Trail:
The following frequently asked questions and answers should help you to understand InfoMinder functionality and how to use the InfoMinder service. If you have any other queries, you may contact us at support@imorph.com .
What is InfoMinder?
InfoMinder is a web hosted service to track one or more web pages and notify you when these pages change. In addition to receiving change notification, InfoMinder marks the changes on the pages for easy viewing. Each tracked page is known as a minder.
Is it a licensed product or a service?
If you want to track a few hundreds of pages, it is offered as a hosted service. If you plan to track thousands of pages, you may purchase a product called InfoMinder Server Edition.
| Offering | Description |
|---|
| InfoMinder Trial | A 30 day trial version that lets you track up to 10 pages. |
| InfoMinder Hosted Server & Server Edition | A site license for the product. Please contact mailto:sales@imorph.com for pricing and options. |
How do I obtain InfoMinder?
Go to www.infominder.com and register for the trial version or one of the subscriptions. If you are interested in a custom version or Server Edition, please contact our sales at sales@imorph.com.
What information do I have to provide to Register?
You provide your Name, Email Address, Affiliation, Industry and Job Position. Other profile information is optional. Some of it (like name, email address) are essential. We use Affiliation, Industry and Job position to find out how we can improve the service for your specific needs.
Do you support corporate accounts? How does it work?
You can either buy the Professional license or Server license. We can also provide a server version called InfoMinder Server Edition. This version can be installed on your own servers and can be used to track internal sites (behind the firewall) and thousands of pages. For more details please contact mailto:sales@imorph.com
What are the possible uses of InfoMinder?
The major benefit of this service is to save you time. Every one of us bookmark several web pages but never have the time to track these pages. InfoMinder is the agent who can perform this function for you. It monitors your pages for changes. When a page changes, it marks all the changes and sends you an email.
- Research departments can use InfoMinder to track thousands of pages. In additions they can set up keyword filters that identify the desired changes. When the page is changed, a notification is sent to the user with the set of changes highlighted.
- Marketing departments can use this to track competitive products, press announcements, alliances and partnerships of their competitors etc. Persons who perform these functions are always overloaded and cannot afford to spend the time to keep up. By using InfoMinder, they need to decide what to track. The grunt work is done by the service. Once a change occurs, with a quick glance they can identify whether the change is of relevance to their business. InfoMinder increases the effectiveness of researchers by removing the grunt work.
- Sales departments can use this to track and obtain sales leads. For example, by tracking a government site, they can come to know of new RFPs (request for proposals).
- Consulting organizations can use these sites to look at project requests in sites like e-lance, agency.com etc. They can also track job postings to see what kind of talent their customers and prospects are hiring and offer consulting service.
- An investor can track the companies they have invested in using multiple information sources. For example, they can use yahoo or other finance pages to find out whether their stock has received an upgrade or downgrade from an analyst.
- Developers can track technologies, products, standards, tools etc.
Do I need Internet connectivity to use InfoMinder?
To register and create minders or modify them, you need to be connected to the Internet. You can elect to receive notifications through email or via RSS feeds. Since our servers watch your pages for you, you need not be connected all the time to the Internet.
Is there a limit to the number of URL's that I can track?
InfoMinder Trial is limited to 10 minders. The Professional license has a higher limit based on the packaging you purchase. If you want a version installed at your own servers, you can purchase the InfoMinder Server Edition.
Can I track all the pages at a site with one URL?
The current version does not do it automatically. If you are interested in a custom version, please send a message to support@imorph.com.
What is meant by "when a web page changes"?
Any content change, which is visible to the eye in the text of the site, is considered a change. This does not include change of meta tags, invisible fields etc.
What is the baseline for a Change?
Any sequence of contiguous words on one page is considered a change unit. You can qualify this with some filtering criteria. For example you may want to look for the occurrence of certain keywords in the changed text. If these key words occur in the modified text on the page, it is signaled as a change.
Which items on a Web page are tracked for changes? e.g. Images, Text, links
The current version tracks only text changes.
If a page has a link that points to another page that has changed, will this be considered a change to the original page?
No.
Can the depth of the search be limited?
Since we track only specified pages, this option is not applicable.
Can I define those "changes"?
In the current version there is no facility for you to define a change. If you have any specific requirements, please send us your suggestions at info@imorph.com.
Can I exclude some changes?
Yes. By applying keyword filtering criteria you can ignore changes that do not meet certain criteria. You can specify a set of keywords and test the changed text to see whether any of them or all of them occur in the changed text.
Do you support "keyword" minding?
Yes. You can use a single key word or multiple keywords to qualify changes.
Do you support "threshold" minding?
If you mean being notified on x number of changes, the answer is yes. You can specify this per minder.
Is there a way to see the extent of changes before seeing the entire web page?
You can opt to receive a digest of the changes through email by category. This will list the number of pages changed under each category and provide a brief summary of each change. You can preview this information and decide whether you want to view the full page with changes marked. The email includes a hyperlink to navigate to the changed page.
Is there a way to see the changes only?
Yes. You can opt to receive the digest and the changes are sent you in an email message.
Is there a way to save the changes only?
No.
How are changes identified on a page?
They are marked visually. You can choose whether they will be marked by background change or by different coloring of the changed text or a combination of both.
Does InfoMinder work only for HTML files or also for Text files?
Currently it works only with HTML files.
Does InfoMinder work with Intranets ?
Yes. We can install a version of the InfoMinder on your intranet and use it instead of using our service. Currently the minimum requirements are an Windows 2000/ Windows 2003/ Windows XP server with Microsoft(TM) SQL Server.
Does InfoMinder work with links on local disk drive?
If you can point to the web content on your local disks with a valid URL, you can detect changes.
How frequently can changes be detected?
For trial and Professional version, we allow pages to be tracked daily or in units of days. For Premium versions we allow tracking 4 times a day. If you purchase InfoMinder Server version and install it on your own servers, you can track pages on an hourly basis.
Can I control how frequently pages are tracked?
Yes. You can set the tracking interval per minder or specify a default for all the pages.
How am I informed that a web page has changed?
There are two modes. You can always log on to the InfoMinder site and view the minders. The changed ones are marked visually.
In addition, you can have InfoMinder send you an email notification when a page changes. If you track a lot of pages, you can group them into categories and receive one notification for each category. You may also receive a single daily digest.
Can I get email at more than one email address?
Currently we do not support this feature. Please use Share Minders feature to distribute changes.
Do I have to set up for HTML type mail to use InfoMinder?
The email contains a URL, which points to the marked page. So your mail format can be text or html.
Does the email actually show the changed web page or does it merely alert me that a change has occurred?
The email contains a preview (the first few words) of a change. In addition, you can choose to receive the changed page as part of the message as an attachment.
If my email service has restrictions on the size of the attachments to email, is that a problem?
Most of the email services we have seen limit the attachments to 1MB or 2MB. If that is a problem, you can choose to receive the URL reference instead of the embedded page.
How do I switch off minding a page?
We have an option to enable/disable a minder for temporarily suspending notifications. You can also delete a minder.
What is your privacy policy?
We do not share any of your information with others. When you share your minders, your email is sent to the other person. Other than that all the information is kept private. We have a way to list the top 10 minders (so statistically the most accessed minders will appear in this list).
All the profile information you supply including the authentication information is confidential and not shared with any one else.
Are there any restrictions on pages that can be tracked?
Not from the InfoMinder point of view. If you can see them from the browser, we can track them.
Is there a limit to the web page size that can be tracked?
In the Personal and Professional version the size is limited to 1 MB per page.
What are Alerts?
Alerts are notifications you receive when the page changes and meets the filtering criteria you specified.
How do I set an Alert?
By choosing an email alert and specifying the email address where you want to be notified.
Can I define my own message for the Alert?
Not in the subscription version. We provide this customization for licensees of InfoMinder Server Edition.
What information is contained in an Alert?
Typically the alert email contains a standard text template notifying you that the page has changed. If you chose a digest version, the changes are summarized for you. Depending on the option you have chosen, it may contain a URL where you can view the changes or both the URL and the image of the changed page.
Is the alert in the form of an email?
Yes. We support email alerts and RSS streams in the current version.
Can I get an alert to my web enabled cell phone?
If your phone has an associated email address, you will be able to receive the alert.
How do you handle broken or invalid page addresses?
We try a certain number of times when a page access results in an error. If the error persists, we disable the minder and provide you a visual indication on the page. We also send you a special error alert email.
How do you handle Robot exclusions?
We do not support it at this point in time. We are not a spider (which typically crawl through a site looking at all the pages). We simply access the page you specify.
How do you handle invalid email addresses?
We are considering disabling the minder on a fixed number of mail errors or soft bounces.
What is meant by Change Stacking?
Change stacking is the ability to accumulate a set of changes over a period of time and report them periodically. For example, you may want to monitor the page every day but report the audit trail of changes once a week (or every hour and report once a day). This will be useful if you can separate the changes and add some semantics to these changes. Will be useful for webmasters and others who track certain status changes along with the rate of change. We do not provide this feature in the current retail version. Can be done using the API to a limited extent.
What is Change Stacking used for?
Typically used to keep an audit trail of changes. It is a useful feature for large complex websites.
Can I organize the URLs that I am tracking?
You can associate a set of key words with each minder. You can categorize minders based on these keywords and get notifications digest for each category.
How do I categorize minders?
When you create a minder, you can specify a set of key words associated with the minder. You can either pick from a pre-defined list or add new keywords of your own. For example, if I want to look at a company page and categorize the company as "Possible Investment", "Competition", "Prospect".
Can I import URLs that I have book marked?
Yes. We provide you a procedure to import bookmarks from Internet explorer and Netscape navigator.
Can I export URLs that I am minding to Bookmarks?
Yes. We provide a mechanism to export URLs to Netscape navigator bookmarks, XBEL, OPML and CSV formats
Which browsers does InfoMinder support?
The current version is tested on both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator (version 4.0 or greater) and Firefox browser.
If I were a Webmaster can I use InfoMinder to send information about page changes to my subscription base? (Push not Pull)
Yes. We provide a facility called "Mind This Page". You can download this from www.infominder.com. We allow you to use one button free per site.
Can I use InfoMinder to track changes to a result set of a search engine query?
This feature is not currently supported in the product.
Can we update the change notification information into a database?
The best way to do this is to obtain the alerts as RSS feeds and write an application to read these feeds and update the database. Our Professional Services group can build it as a custom solution, if you need it.
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