Unable to enroll in exams or renew ROL subscription

Latest response

A number of Red Hat reps have already been at work on this one, but before my ROL subscription expires today, I thought I would toss this out there and see if anyone has similar issues.

(1) There is no way to complete registration for exams that happen "after" my ROL subscription expires.
Namely, I have an exam in February that I have purchased and registered for, but cannot enroll in. The "enrollment key" apparently cannot be used.
The following message appears:
"This offering starts after the end of your current subscription period ending 20-Jan-18"
It appears there is a control on ROL subscription holders that disallows them from enrolling in exams after their subscription expires. This makes sense if you have a "General" subscription and are using credits to pay for exams. That way subscribers can't cash in on unused tests after their subscription ends.
But if you have a "Basic" subscription, you pay out of pocket. Unfortunately, the restriction still applies. (screenshot attached, with PII redacted)

(2) ROL Basic subscriptions purchased from Red hat directly can't renew before they run out. I purchased the ROL sub from Red Hat directly. (for the free jacket, of course) Attempting to renew online leads to endless redirects. The training team hasn't been able to renew me either. If I have to let it expire and purchase a fresh subscription, I am guessing my course progress and bookmarked pages will be wiped clean. (not a major issue for me)
Combined with Issue (1) above it this presents more of a roadblock.

Responses

David,

If you're an RHLS-Standard customer, a subscription that also includes access to exams, then what you're describing is correct. Exams that are a part of the subscription expire with the subscription and you can not book them to occur outside your subscription period (as they much occur within the subscription access time).

However, if you're an RHLS-Basic user and you've purchased exams separately, the two products should not conflict, if they are, it sounds like a bug in the business logic being used for exam redemption. You should work with your regional training operations person to chase this down and resolve it:

https://rol.redhat.com/rol/vtc/account_support

As for your renewal... Ugh. Again, I think the business logic in the purchase process is the culprit. From the back-end, we are certainly capable of extending someone's RHLS-Basic subscription as part of a renewal. I'll talk with the folks responsible for the front-end purchase/scheduling application. In the mean-time, while our public stance on expiration is that "if your account expires your data is forfeit", there are a number of customer situations that we need to account for. As an example, what if someone is paying via PO or check and there's a couple of day gap between when the payment type is received vs. verified, and that couple of day gap occurs at the end of the subscription? In such a situation, the subscriber would be pretty unhappy if we blanked their stuff between when their subscription ended and when verification of payment was complete. If you file the order for your renewal after your expiration, I would guess that you'll be fine.

Thanks for trying to renew! I'm personally disappointed that where we're falling down is at the 'processing the order/taking the money' part of the interchange...

-Scott

Scott McBrien Principal Product Manager, Red Hat Online Training Red Hat Certified Architect, Level VI (100-000-264)

Thanks for the response Scott!

Update from me: My ROL subscription expired before the learning team was able to get me a quote on renewal. This at least allowed me to complete enrollment for the exam. So I am good there, but the issue remains for other ROL subscription holders.

I would still like to renew my ROL subscription if the sales team can get it to work. I can pay with a card, as soon as they can get me a working quote. It has been a great resource for me over the last year. Red Hat Access is good too, but when I have an issue with Ansible playbooks or forensics, nothing beats being able to work through scenarios in a lab exercise.

David,

Understood, I opened a support case internally reporting the issue. Though, with your subscription being expired, they may not be able to troubleshoot the cause of the issue (now that the issue doesn't exist/is not observable by them). I'll bring the issue up on a call that I participate in this week, and maybe that'll raise it's priority a bit, or get it into the hands of some people that can progress it forward.

I'm glad you're finding continued value in the subscription, again, sorry for our difficulties to process the renewal. It sounds like you're in the right hands though (sales). I don't get involved in the sales/order taking/order fulfilment side of the house as the salespeople themselves are going to have a voice that carries more weight than mine in that arena.

-STM

Just got another update to my internal case. The systems guys know about it and are working on a resolution that should be ready later this month/early February. That should keep this from being an issue for subscribers in the future.

-STM

Just some feedback regarding this. My sub lapsed, and after a week or so of wrangling with Sales I managed to get a link from Andrea Wise that allowed me to resub. It took a lot of attempts to do this, and we verified that resubbing on the site is impossible.

My progress carried over, but so did my hours used.

http://brinsonfamily.org/images/ROL_hoursUsed_after_renewal.png

As one can see from the image, it would be impossible to have over 100 hours used in ROL while only having been resubbed for two days. The Beta is showing hours from the previous year.

The 16 hours used in that course would be pretty accurate if it counts "lab hours used since January 1". But it is too low if it counts last year. I hadn't even started the lab since renewal.

Hi David,

Thanks for the update, I'm glad your subscription renewal was finally straightened out.

The Lab Hours Usage features are tagged as "Beta", and this is exactly the type of reason why we did so. I think you should open up a support case using the Red Hat Customer Portal (https://access.redhat.com), when you do, set the product to "Red Hat Online Learning", which will make sure it is routed to the support team that handles online training cases.

There's really two dimensions to the lab consumption data. The first is for the lab hours that are included with the subscription. In the product description and the terms and conditions we set forth that 400 hours of lab runtime are included with the subscription. Of course, without any consumption data, people are always asking for how much time they've used or wanting to see it, so we produced the report and now, the UI elements that indicate how much time has been consumed. In this usage, it makes perfect sense that upon a renewal, we'd just wipe out the time used on labs, so that customers could start accumulating more hours with their renewed subscription.

But there's another dimension of how this data is used as well. A measurement of subscription consumption and value. If you sent your boss a usage report and it said that you had achieved 100% completeness on a class, but on the lab consumption page, it said you only used 2 hours of labs for that class, did you really take the class, or just click-through all the pages? If, upon renewal we just wiped all your lab hour usage, it would render this consumption aspect of the data as null, and then would perhaps make the rest of the consumption data suspect.

I expect that we'll probably be further updating these elements in the future such that a middle-ground can be established. Something like keeping track of your usage of all hours, in aggregate during your current subscription period, while also keeping track of your history since the beginning of time so that our representation of your activity on different classes also keeps it's history and accuracy. That way, upon your renewal, we just reset your aggregate usage during your subscription period, but also keep your runtime data so that in a year, you still show on your usage reports that RH124 is 100% complete and you used 40 hours on it.

-STM

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