(July 3, 2018)

We've initiated retirement of two courses from RHLS-Basic:
JB417 - Switchyard Development with Red Hat JBoss Fuse Serviceworks
This class was centered around a technology (Switchyard) which has been unsupported by Red Hat engineering for over a year. One of the focuses on the catalog management we do is to make sure that the content in the catalog is relevant and supported for Red Hat customers. Since this technology was left behind, it wast time to remove it from the catalog.

JB439 - Red Hat JBoss Fuse Rapid Track
This class was a mashup of JB421 and JB435 (both of which are still in the catalog). This class is no longer in the roadmap for the Middleware curriculum team, which is why it's been retired.

Both these courses have already been retired from the RHLS-Standard catalog, but apparently, there was a breakdown in the process to get these retired from RHLS-Basic. Additionally, I would have liked to update this thread as they started the process in RHLS-Standard, but was not notified. I'll work to improve our internal process so that everything happens at once and several different outlets for this news are used.

In RHLS-Standard, when a course is retired, we lock the ability of the course to accept new enrollments. Existing enrolled users will have 30 days to complete the course before it is removed from the catalog. If a user attempts to join a locked class, they'll get a message that the course is retired. When we start this process, we update the description of the course to indicate that in 30 days we'll be retiring the course. Then we 'lock' it. We then update the description to indicate that existing users have 30 days to complete the course and that we're no longer accepting new enrollments to the course.

The process is not as smooth in RHLS-Basic, as we don't utilize the same fields for course information. That's something we'll work on improving. For basic, we lock the course enrollments, which makes the class not accept new enrollments (reports retired message on new join events). Then in 30 days, delete it from the catalog.

(January 10, 2018)

We cleaned out some retired classes and versions of classes from the portfolio. I've broken down the list into one of Classes and one of Versions to make it a little more legible.

Why do we do retirements? It depends. Sometimes we replace a class with a different one, or move a class from one curriculum to another. For example, we had some OpenShift classes that were originally "Cloud" curriculum, but are now "DevOps". In other cases, we've determined that a class isn't widely consumed, so we phase it out and build something different instead of revising the unpopular course (as was the case with RH270). And sometimes, it's a bunch of different small reasons that just accumulate into a decision to not continue a class.

As for versions, if a version of the product is no longer supported or we've replaced a course on a more updated revision of the product, we'll retire an old version.

Courses Retired:
RH270 Managing Containers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host - This course was retired over the summer, however the companion certification exam was not retired until recently. We added the class back into the catalog to support the exam, but now that the exam is also retired, RH270 has been removed. Many of the container administration topics and content have been relocated into DO180 Introduction to Containers, Kubernetes, and RedHat OpenShift.

Versions Retired:
CL210 OpenStack Administration II version 6 - We still have versions 8 and the recently released version 10.1 in the catalog. OpenStack version 10 is a longer-term supported version of the product release and version 6 was no longer supported.

CL220 CloudForms Hybrid Cloud Management version 3.1 - Last spring we released an update to this course which updated the product version used in class to 4.1. The newer product includes a large number of updates and changes and it's been many, many months since any new students went in and used the version 3.1 materials.

DO280 Red Hat OpenShift Administration version 3.0 - We still include the updates for these classes on version 3.4 and 3.5. Also, the Video Classroom course has been updated and released for version 3.5.

DO290 OpenShift Enterprise Development version 3.0 - The updated version of the course, based on OpenShift 3.5 was released last September [2017]. Because the administration class is also 3.5 based, and version 3.0 of that class was retired, we thought it best to keep this very related course in the same version availability.

JB248 JBoss Application Administration version 6.0 version 7 is the most recent application server and course version, but we also offer an updated version of the course on EAP 6.3. The course based on version 6.3 is better than the one on 6.0 and still covers the EAP version 6 family.

RH403 Red Hat Satellite versions 6.0 and 6.1 version 6.2.1 is the most current in the training catalog. Iterations of the Satellite product tend to bring large updates to the user interface as well as stability of the product. With a better product, you have better labs, so we removed the earlier versions of the class where labs were based on obsolete versions of the product.

RH236 Red Hat Gluster Storage version 3.0 The course is stil in the catalog; we released an updated course based on Red Hat Gluster Storage version 3.1.2 in the summer of 2016. Version 3.0 of the product was outdated then, and is even moreso now, so we chose to remove it.