Original publication date: December, 2007
As we announced in the August issue of Softshare Times, Softshare added support for HTTPS access (secure HTTP) to your hosted WebCATS and eCenter Web sites. HTTPS security ensures privacy of communications between your browser and the Softshare ‘CATS server.
It’s easy to use. Simply switch the HTTP part of your WebCATS or eCenter URL for HTTPS. For example, if you access WebCATS at http://mycenter.softshare.com, enter https://mycenter.softshare.com instead. You’ll get to the same place—but securely.
Since secure is always better than insecure, and secure HTTP access has worked beatifully since Softshare began supporting it, we’re officially discontinuing HTTP access to your Softshare-hosted WebCATS sites on February 1, 2008.
Although we intend to put redirects in place, you’ll still want to update all of your bookmarks in Microsoft Internet Explorer (e.g. your “Favorites”). Except, don’t just update your bookmarks. Delete your existing bookmarks and recreate them from scratch. Why all the trouble? In testing, Softshare discovered that IE6 and IE7 don’t take kindly to http --> https redirects if the redirect is entered via a pre-existing bookmark, even if that existing bookmark has been updated to reflect the new secure HTTP URL. Under this scenario, both IE versions will give you errors as you move through the WebCATS interface.
Note: We’ll let you decide which URL your clients use to access eCenter. Since the data going through eCenter is not as sensitive as the data in WebCATS, Softshare is not mandating secure HTTP access to hosted eCenter sites.