I finally was notified Friday night of my eligibility participate in MacKiev’s 48-hour beta test of FTM2017. While I have been, and will continue to be, critical of the process (Mackiev’s latest update engenders even less confidence, puts 2017 release 3 weeks behind with no firm date for release) I was largely happy with the new software, and can’t wait for it to go live.

Listen to their advice: Use a practice/non-critical tree for your testing.

I have over 20 years experience testing software releases (MacKiev 2 weeks late with Family Tree Maker 2017 release, still “getting close”), so I’ve been through this before, however for this beta test I didn’t do an exhaustive breakdown of every feature or even attempt to use the new features. I just kept it simple, focused on how to sync with my existing FTM 3 trees that were linked to Ancestry.com, and went through a few generations of new ancestors to a speculative tree I’d chosen to test with.

That brings me to my first impression. Listen to their advice: Use a practice/non-critical tree for your testing. My concern wasn’t about data loss, and I don’t think there’s a reason to be concerned about that, but since my larger trees have multiple owners/editors/viewers, if I had to re-upload them and reassign those it would be difficult. I feel like it was good I was concerned about that as it relates to a test, and like it will be less of a concern when we’re not limited to a short beta.

Other than that, I feel that the interface was easy to understand, and as a long-time user of Family Tree Maker there were no surprises. Due to a confidentiality agreement I agreed to I won’t go into detail about look/feel/placement of things in the application, but I think it’s safe to say I felt like it was not much of a learning curve going from FTM 3 to FTM 2017. My impression was that overall, FTM 2017 felt more modern, updated and refreshed.

My impression is that this is a mature, (nearly?) ready for production release software package that will be a welcome refresh for FTM users. I have some complaints, but since I can’t yet discuss features or how/if various features have changed, I can’t go into them until Family Tree Maker is released to the public. Generally I’ll say that given MacKiev’s spotty rollout of this product, and some of the complaints I can’t yet detail, Family Tree Maker 2017 is likely to keep me satisfied in the short-to-medium term while I start to research alternatives just in-case this is as good as it gets.