Liferay Intranet Portal with Google Charts Dashboard

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I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, and finally got around to adding Google Charts into an enterprise intranet portal. We had five unique data points to display as key performance indicators (KPIs) for how the organization is performing.

We have delivered a number of whizbang charting and dashboard capabilities and had a lot of fun with them over the years, but this time, we wanted a lightweight capability that generated images (no Flash and no JavaScript) so any old browser on any platform would render this area properly. We also didn’t want to introduce any extra file downloads associated to the various charting libraries we have used in the past.

We decided to use a Google-O-Meter (the gauge at top of the image) and Bar Charts (the lower four bars). There were a number of tricks we employed to get these looking the way we needed (transparent background, proportionally accurate grid lines in the bar charts, a think arrow in the Google-O-Meter, etc.), but the most satisfying aspect was the simple ability to integrate this with custom Liferay Web Content Structures and Web Content Templates.

We are pleased and impressed with how easily and nicely these technologies came together. Give it a shot sometime and if there is a lot of interest, we might get some time to post a detailed white paper on how to go about this.

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