Family Tree Maker 2017 – May 11, Adding More Testers

It’s been just over a week since the last update to the Family Tree Maker 2017 testing, and this afternoon, another update was released:

Working with Ancestry we’ve decided it’s time to let a whole lot more test drivers join the first 25,000 who’ve been happily using FTM 2017 for the past two weeks. We have already started earlier this week tapping those on the “alternate” list and hope to add the rest of you by the end of the weekend.

Then starting on Monday next week, we’ll be opening up as many as 10,000 places a day until we reach 75,000 test drivers by the end of the week. New drivers will start with the same 48-hour trial followed by a diagnostic test. If all goes well, test drivers just continue using the software.

If you are already test driving you are all set, just keep at it. We will let you know when we have a newer well-tested build for you. If you stopped test driving, watch for an email from us tomorrow, in which we’ll have instructions on how to get your test drive started again.

What it sounds like, is that Ancestry has been busy improving their infrastructure/back-end. As I’ve mentioned before, sometime later this year, RootsMagic will also be synchronizing with Ancestry.com, so the load on Ancestry.com’s servers will increase substantially.

As such, Ancestry.com is allowing the FTM developers to remove user limits, which opens the door for Family Tree Maker 2017 to be released to the general public later this month:

We are now beta testing builds made with the final adjustments from Ancestry that we received a week and a half ago. Those provide a much streamlined process for syncing changes made on the Ancestry side and will allow us to remove all limits from adding FTM 2017 users to the system.

So when will that be done? We’ll update you when the beta testing tells us we’ve been successful. The next step would be to provide a new build to our test drivers, and then the rest of the world. We can’t provide an exact date yet, but we’re optimistically guessing a couple of weeks.