Progress in FamilySearch Family Tree Certification

The transition from New.FamilySearch.org to FamilySearch Family Tree continues to progress as the third-party developers work through the levels of certification. Meanwhile, as far as the user experience of both New.FamilySearch.org and Family Tree are concerned, very little has changed. The two programs are still sharing the same database and changes made in New.FamilySearch.org still show up in Family Tree. What is important is that the third-party programs now connect directly to Family Tree and bypass the connection to New.FamilySearch.org thereby eliminated one more source of conflicting entries in the programs. You can view the status of the current certification levels on the Product Page of FamilySearch.org.

The recent deadline imposed on the certified third-party developers was effective in motivating an initial round of changes to their programs, but those changes are ongoing and there will be a continual background of announcements from developers as they continue to work with FamilySearch.

Two recent announcements from developers illustrate this process.

On 19 July 2013, Incline Software, the developer of Ancestral Quest and other products, announced FamilySearch Family Tree Share Certification. This means that the product can compare and reconcile all data in both Family Tree and the product. Ancestral Quest is in a significant position as it is the only Family Tree certified product that can share data between Family Tree and a Personal Ancestral File (PAF) database. If you are a current PAF users, please take the time to read the press release.

Concurrently, RootsMage released a statement entitled "New Tools to Fix "Unmatching" Problems with FamilySearch Family Tree" concerning some of the issues involved in working with FamilySearch in the changeover. Quoting from the newsletter:

This past weekend a number of users started reporting that people that they had matched to FamilySearch were "unmatching" automatically, and even worse were leaving those people in their file unable to be re-matched with FamilySearch. If you encountered this issue, please read on.  If not, you can still do the following if you want (just in case).  No data was affected, it was simply the links between RootsMagic and FamilySearch, so there isn't a need to worry about data corruption.  We spent a lot of hours trying to track down what was happening, and have confirmation that FamilySearch has identified the issue with their last Family Tree API update causing the Matching/UnMatching issues inside of RootsMagic.  (Note: API means "Application Program Interface" and is just the code on the FamilySearch server that RootsMagic has to talk to). If you have this problem, please see the newsletter or contact RootsMagic about the fix. As time goes on, there will be more issues with Family Tree but the current progress is promising.