Friday, August 12, 2011

Family Tree Maker 2012 Beta News

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I received this in email via the Ancestry.com Weekly discovery email distribution about Family Tree Maker 2012 Beta testing:

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Thank you for all of the testing and feedback regarding the new 2012 release of Family Tree Maker and TreeSync™: the ability to synchronize information in your tree between Family Tree Maker and Ancestry.com. This has been very useful to us and effective in helping us to make significant improvements to the software.

TAKE A BREAK
We are in the process of making some changes to our servers here at
Ancestry.com. We suggest that you take a break from testing the sync process for the next couple of days. Tuesday morning (Aug. 16) we will post a new update that can be used for further testing. Notification of the new build will be sent in a follow-up email and posted on the Beta message board. In order to continue testing, your current beta version of Family Tree Maker 2012 will need to be uninstalled and the new update will have to be downloaded and installed.

VERY IMPORTANT
When you get the new software, you'll notice that all of the trees you've been testing are no longer linked between Family Tree Maker and
Ancestry.com. The changes we're making over the weekend will require that you delete all of the trees you have been using for testing. The new update is much more solid and includes some important improvements, and it is important that we start this next round of testing with a clean slate to help us insure that none of the problems with previous beta versions are showing up anymore.

In order to continue using the software after you've deleted the trees you've been using for testing, you will need to re-import new trees from your previous version of Family Tree Maker or download new trees from
Ancestry.com. DO NOT continue to use any trees that have been synchronized during the beta period.

During the beta period, please continue to test only with a backup of your tree. To create and use a secondary copy of your online tree, you can download a current online tree to a GEDCOM file and then re-import it as a new tree. Then use the newly-imported tree for sync testing. To create and use a secondary copy of your tree in Family Tree Maker, use the Backup feature in your previous version of Family Tree Maker to make a backup file and then restore that file in Family Tree Maker 2012.

Please post any issues you find with new threads on the message board.

We are very excited about the new release of Family Tree Maker, and we thank you all for helping us to make it a solid release.


Many synchronization proboems between Family Tree Maker 2012 and Ancestry Member Trees have been reported on the FTM Sync Beta mailing list.  Many of them have been resolved, and most of them have been explored in detail by FTM staff, volunteers and beta-testers.

One of my significant problems was that when I synced my FTM2012 Tree to the Ancestry Member Tree, all of the children disappeared from the Ancestry tree (they were still in the database, but did not show up in the parents profiles.  This problem was traced to using the Version 306 of FTM2012 with an Ancestry tree created by a previous FTM2012 version.  Once I unlinked my Ancestry tree from the FTM2012 tree, copied my FTM2012 tree, loaded the copied tree in FTM2012, and uploaded it using FTM2012 into Ancestry, the children were there.  A subsequent synchronization worked also. 

If you are an FTM2012 beta tester, please follow the directions given above in this email. 

1 comment:

Geolover said...

Thank you for following the developments regarding this program.

Yes it was evident from the message board posts that the last FTM2012 Beta update was not playing well with trees created in or uploaded via the previous version(s). The developers could have come right out and said that the testers should start fresh with the new build.

It is to be hoped that the AMT site changes will not have adverse effects for those who are skeptical about stability and efficacy of FTM. And they still have not fixed the citation issues.