Tuesday, August 28, 2012

FTM Lucky 13

Ancestry.com Family Tree Maker 2012For owners of Family Tree Maker (FTM) 2012, 2013 is proving to be a very lucky year. Ancestry.com recently announced that they will not be releasing an FTM 2013. This means owners of FTM 2012 will have another year during which they can receive free updates.

“We have decided to make several key updates to the existing software, and give those updates away for free,” said Ancestry spokesperson, Matthew Deighton. “We will be working hard this year to improve the current product and you will see these bonus features throughout the year.”

According to Ancestry, numerous new features have already been added to FTM 2012:

  • Numerous enhancements to TreeSync so syncing your tree to Ancestry.com is faster and more reliable
  • A new Family View Report that displays a person’s ancestors, spouse, and children together (similar to the Family View in the People workspace)
  • A new Undocumented Facts Report that lists people’s facts that have no source documentation
  • The ability to merge info from multiple versions of the same fact
  • New source templates for the 1940 U.S. census and improved support for city directories
  • Dozens of report enhancements including performance improvements and new options in the relationship chart, family group sheet, Individual Report, Notes Report, Data Errors Report, Outline Descendant Report, Media Item Report, photo albums, Media Usage Report, Documented Facts Report, and calendar

Owners of previous versions can qualify for the free updates by first upgrading to FTM 2012.

6 comments:

  1. And for those of us not using FTM we may feel doubly blessed that our program seems to work fine without the need to have a yearly make over!! An occasional update seems to work fine.

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  2. Ever hear the term marketing spin?

    When FTM 2012 first came out, it was absolutely not ready for release. Most of the "upgrades" were fixes for serious problems.

    It is still atrociously slow and a terrible memory hog.

    I do my work from the ancestry.com tree side and use FTM for reports. Working from the FTM side for searching and adding just wastes too much time.

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  3. They sure need to 'update' their tutorial. It is nothing more than an advertisement for what you can do with FTM2012. It does nothing to tell you HOW to do it. I tried to follow along with the so-called tutorial and gave up. Never have been able to use it and went back to my old software. Sure can't recommend this software.

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  4. Apart from the primary news in this Ancestry.com press release that there will be no FTM 2013, the company offers little useful information. The updated features cited are from past, not future, updates; and no mention is made of the features or fixes Ancestry.com plans to release for FTM 2012's second spin around the sun. Does the Ancestry Insider have any inside information about any planned feature additions? Or should we only expect a few bug fixes and a revamped report or two?

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  5. Ohana Software's announcement that Ancestry has asked them to remove the capability for Family Insight to work with FTM is a clue that perhaps Ancestry will add some FamilySearch linkages to FTM. Just guessing here.

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  6. It seems ironic that, soon after the recent compulsory FTM upgrade which promised better online-FTM syncing, many users are finding it slower and getting a lot more "we're so popular that you'll have to wait a few hours" messages before they can sync.

    What's needed is some capital investment in server capacity, and addressing the speed of searches. It seems routine to have to go away and come back a few days later to allow time for Ancestry to find the birth/death record for that 3rd cousin you've just discovered. Maybe employing Google to examine the problem would be a better way to give subscribers what we should be getting?

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