Newsroom - Archive

September 2004

As eSkill expands and improves its services, answering rapidly to our customers' suggestions and demands has been our number one success factor. We hope you enjoy our new look, which should make it easier for both customers and guests to find the tests, services, and login pages they wish.

Note that our subject range is continuously changing to reflect newest technology trends. Please drop us a note at info@eskill.com if you have any suggestions or feedback for us.

August 2004

New primary knowledge subjects available, a new subject arrangement in existing and new categories, separated Typing and Data Entry categories, already available samples both for typing and data entry issues, under separate interests, for various time and difficulty scenarios, available typing test samples in Spanish language, a re-arrangement and enrichment of the English language testing (the language and grammar are now separated off spelling and vocabulary, new questions added to all issues behind these subjects).

Reordering questions in a text is simpler than ever. Moreover, the test center now offers the possibility to shuffle the questions in a text, in order to keep the content while drastically changing the layout for the test-takers.

July 2004

Trying to keep up with products, as well as technology, the list of reviewed subjects increased. The PC Hardware was upgraded to the latest frequencies in order to avoid the subject's deprecation. The Network Essentials suffered a similar cosmetization. The new Microsoft Office 2003 is now included in our subject list (for the beginning just as a mixed subject, with the promise the individual subjects, together with Windows 2003, shall become available in September.

When picking questions from a subject, a list of already selected questions from all the current subject is always visible until they are saved to the currently edited test. Customer users are now three types: administrator, read only and individual. While read-only users are only allowed to view tests and results (best for reviews, for example), individual users could be test-takers who would make their own tests and take them. Thus, an employer cold have a more complex view on the individual's willingness to improve his knowledge and, at the same time, view the results on these individual tests the employees built themselves.

June 2004

In order to enhance the customer experience, new navigation buttons have been added to the preview question popup, as well as a button for automatically including the currently displayed question to the test. As the number of customers and, consequently, test-takers increased significantly, the database supported repeated performance reviews and fixes in order to keep up the speed our customers were used to. Customers are able now to enable or disable their users' activity.

May 2004

The order of the questions was quite an issue. In order to build a custom test where the order of the questions could matter, the customers were in come trouble as they would have to lose some time in order to achieve that. Now, the eSkill testing system allows question re-ordering so once the questions are added to the text, making one question move up or down is no longer an issue. An older feature outlined the questions already added to the test so they look different. Now the feature has been also extended to questions that were previewed in separate windows so the customer is no more required to remember which questions were already viewed and classified. These viewed questions appear on a bluish background. With regard to typing questions, customers may now clearly see the results, what were the most frequent errors (missing punctuation or missing letters, maybe quite missing words, a perfect start spoiled by speeding up in the end or maybe an emotionally failed start marked by a perfect end as confidence increases). Measure all that easily and visually using eSkill typing tests.

April 2004

The eSkill.com servers have been upgraded and now we are using a three tier aproach based on Microsoft SQL Server 2000 as database server and a Java Application Server hosted on Linux. Now the number of concurrent users we are able to handle has multiplied by a factor of 10 and we are able to provide a much more reliable and fast service. Enhanced the test and result mailing feature so it becomes also available to secondary customer accounts, not just the main customer login. Included the typing tests. Now subjects' speed of typing as well as their results' accuracy may be easily measured. No need for a person to watch the subject, eyes no the clock, until the sample paper is finished. Use eSkill: both the speed (words per minute) and the accuracy (percentage of correctness) are automatically measured. The same keyboard and the same text make all subjects equal, additionally decreasing the stress over being "measured by the clock".

March 2004

Customers should pay now more attention. In the past, to delete a test, all the scores must have been already deleted (only resultless tests could be deleted). In order both to enhance the customer experience (especially for recruiting agencies) and to reduce the number of database actions, now deleting a test also deletes all results pertaining to that test. Of course this action must be confirmed by the customer prior to proceeding. The persistence layer standing supporting the relation between the application and the database was upgraded to the latest stable version, increasing both reliability and speed. Sample test-takers are now e-mailed the results immediately as they finish the sample test. Computer beginners now have their specific subject. It is not a shame not knowing so much about computers, as long as one keeps trying to develop and learn new things every day. Taking the Basic Computer Knowledge test could reveal many basic features which should be familiar to any computer-user.

Computer beginners now have their specific subject. It is not a shame not knowing so much about computers, as long as one keeps trying to develop and learn new things every day. Taking the Basic Computer Knowledge test could reveal many basic features which should be familiar to any computer-user.

February 2004

The security level for test results was increased to prevent test-takers from even trying to see other results. The security algorithm used for securing results is DES, additionally enforced with a password. To increase the readability and avoiding error messages, the questions in the pick list which are already in the test appear gray-ed.

Included some of the latest Microsoft technologies (Office XP applications as well as Windows XP.

January 2004

The results page is now more handy. Both the subject's answer and the correct answer are displayed as columns, next to the question description so the customer may easily evaluate the test-taker's knowledge without having to display all the questions in the results page. The list of questions in the selection page (to add more questions to a test was paginated in order to load faster and provide some visual aid (by using question numbers).

December 2003

Test subjects having slower connection are offered a better experience using eSkill - a broken connection or just a traffic jam on the quite slow dial-up connection is no longer an issue. Whenever necessary, the test subject may terminate the connection. When coming back to the same test, the user is offered the possibility to continue the previously broke session, all typed results being there. Of course the same credentials (test id, name and e-mail address) must be provided. The test shall come back, however to question 1 because we recommend an user who must continue a test this way to review shortly all previously typed answers.

November 2003

The brand new version 2. The developers have replaced the persistence layer. Now the database connection is more reliable and faster. This fixed minor issues which could raise when database interaction was needed. Now customers may use PDF reports both for tests (as a hard-copy of the test itself) and for results, which can help a lot in comparing the results of various test subjects. The increasing number of subjects required some kind of grouping, therefore all subjects where grouped in 5 categories. The web server supporting the application is now the top open-source technology: the latest stable version of TomCat. This ensures a higher degree of reliability.

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