Coming into the home stretch -- FamilySearch Certified Products

As far as I have seen, the FamilySearch imposed deadline of 30 June 2013 for the third-party developers to certify for Family Tree or be partially blocked from New.FamilySearch.org is still in place. There has been a scramble, by some, to get certified on time. Since we only have two days left (and a weekend at that) before July rolls around, I would guess that either the remaining developers have made some other arrangements, or they are not going to try for Family Tree certification until sometime later or ever. 

Let me set the stage here. FamilySearch.org Family Tree (FSFT) is the replacement for the now abandoned New.FamilySearch.org (NFS). FSFT has been live and active for over a year and has undergone a considerable amount of development and changes. FamilySearch.org has a huge customer base. As one of the four major genealogically oriented websites, it has a prominent place in the genealogical community. However, mainly due to the demographics of the community, moving the users of the website to new products is a slow and tedious project. For example, Personal Ancestral File, FamilySearch’s desktop software program was abandoned and stopped development in 2002, but it is only now in 2013 that the abandonment was formalized. Despite this, there are likely hundreds of thousands of Personal Ancestral File users who are still using the program. In the same vein, there are likely very many NFS users who are entirely unaware of the change over to Family Tree.

But waiting for some of the NFS users to move to FSFT would be a very long wait. Some of them would never voluntarily change: hence, the deadlines and the reason for turning off NFS. Of course, the main reason for turning off NFS is that FSFT doesn’t work completely until the two programs are separated from using the same database.

Now back to the developers. I am not going to reproduce the list of approved developers here in a blog post. It would likely change before you read this post. So go to this page if you want to see what is currently approved for what level of involvement with FSFT. Of course, there may be some who are certified at the last minute, but they haven't yet updated the page, so I would check back next week to see how things stack up.