Monday, August 1, 2011

Family Tree Maker 2012 is in a Public Beta Test

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The news last week on the FTM-TECH mailing list was that Family Tree Maker 2012 was in a Public Beta test.  A link to the Public Beta download was provided, and a number of persons have apparently taken advantage of it. 

Tamura Jones covered the sequence of events in his post today, Family Tree Maker 2012 Public Beta on his Modern Software Experience blog, and mentioned it on Google Plus yesterday.

The post by the FTM-TECH admin, dated 27 July 2011, quotes the letter sent out to Beta testers:

"/Family Tree Maker 2012/ is coming this Fall, and we'd like to invite you to try out the beta version! The product is currently in pre-release testing and we're refining its key feature, TreeSync™, which lets you link your Family Tree Maker desktop tree and Ancestry tree together.

"Participants in the beta will be entered in a drawing to win one of  *five* Ancestry.com World Deluxe Memberships (6-month membership is  valued more than $148.00—see details, below).

"To participate, please try out TreeSync™ with your own tree files—as many as possible. If you already have a Family Tree Maker file, upload and link it to Ancestry. (Please note that because this product is in beta, it is presented AS IS without warranty. Because you may encounter problems, we recommend that you *DO NOT use your original files*, instead, you should create and *use a copy* of the original files.) If you don't have a Family Tree Maker file, you can still participate. Just download and link your Ancestry Member Tree in /Family Tree Maker/. If you need help, we've included a draft of the User Guide that discusses sync, which you can use to guide your testing.


The link given in the FTM-TECH mailing list post does not work any longer.  The FTM 2012 Public Beta download site is http://dl.dropbox.com/u/840832/FTM_2012_Public_Beta.zip per several contacts. My understanding is that the Public Beta software will work until 31 August 2011. 

Update 4 p.m. on Monday: The Dropbox link does not work now.

My guess is that FTM 2012 will be available soon after that, and may be available at the Federation of Genealogical Societies Conference in Springfield, Illinois September 7-10.

I downloaded the 450 mb ZIP file last night, installed the program, loaded my latest GEDCOM database, and uploaded it as a Private Member Tree to Ancestry.com.  That process took over an hour, but it worked the first time for me on my relatively new computer. 

I saw nothing in the Terms and Conditions of the download of the Public Beta software download that prevents me from discussing the FTM 2012 Public Beta test, so I'm going to show a few screens and discuss my experiences with the program here on Genea-Musings. 

During the upload of my FTM 2012 database (with almost 40,000 persons) to Ancestry, I made this screen capture:


As you can see, I was in the "Plan" workspace, and the center panel is titled "Online Access via Ancestry."  That panel notes that my database is not yet uploaded and linked to Ancestry.  The progress window below shows that the program is working on it.  I didn't measure the time it took.

Finally, the upload concluded, and the screen below shows now:



The center "Online Access to Ancestry" panel now says "In Sync" and "On-line and local tree now in Sync."

On Ancestry.com, my new Tree looks like this:



The next test will be to add content to my Ancestry.com tree and see how it synchronizes with Family Tree Maker 2012.  What should I add to my tree in order to test the synchronization feature?  Tell me in comments or email.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Add one person that you can link to one census image on Ancestry and then hit the synch icon.

Anonymous said...

I tested the viability of the website to Family Tree Maker sync, and was very pleased with the results.
I tested adding new people, deleting a person, adding a fact, deleting a fact, adding external documents, adding external photos, adding internal documents, adding internal photos, merging a census into a person, merging a census into a family group, and merging another tree's information into one of my people.
All in all, I made 37 changes to the online tree, and had 37 changes sync into my Family Tree Maker tree. That's all I could think of to do - does anyone else have any ideas?

Tommyp said...

Try "merging two specific individuals" in FTM and see what happens online.

I always work on the local file -- I will want it to sync to the online file.

Jennifer Holik said...

Hi Randy,

So do you have to upload a tree to start the sync or does it allow you to connect to a tree already on Ancestry?

If it does, then it should look at both your FTM tree and Ancestry tree and adjust both as needed right?

Or do I just have to upload a brand new tree and remove the old one?

Thanks!

ourtnfamilytree said...

What if you don't currently run FTM?
Can you download the Beta and download your tree to it from Ancestry and then run it?

ourtnfamilytree said...

If you are NOT using FTM currently, can you down load the BETA Version and then down load you stuff from Ancestry to your BETA version?

Anonymous said...

2012 does have improvements. However, I prepared to test and made a copy of a tree to work with. When I downloaded the 2012 Beta, it changed the format of all my other trees in the directory. I could not open them any longer in my older version of FTM. The good thing was that I could save in the old format and open them.

I wanted to clean up my old trees and make verified media links through a systematic migration to the Beta version. However it grabbed all the media that was in the directory, and left me in the same condition.

Then, the timer expired on the Beta version and I still had old trees that were not saved in the old format. Hence, I can not open them any longer. Would have been nice to have one days notice.

Now I have to wait until 2012 ships before I can do anything.