Blog Entry

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For those who are not aware, Novell Operations Center Dashboard is built on Liferay. Based on that, there are many tips, tricks, themes and portlets that can be accessed on the liferay site and/or plugged into your Dashboard to expand the overall functionality and/or look of the Dashboard.

It's actually pretty easy to download and install new portlets. Once you are logged into the Dashboard with an administrator account, go into Control Panel. From there select Plugins Installation, this will bring up a list of the currently installed plugins. Pressing the "Install More Portlets" button brings up a list of themes and portlets that can be download and installed.

When you find a portlet or theme of interest, click on it. This will bring up a page that provides more information about the portlet or theme. You can then press the button to download and install it. You really should do this on a dev/test system, it is possible that the portlet will not work as expected.

Once the screen updates that the item has been installed, you can then add it to a page or update the settings to use the new theme. If you find something of interest and want to use it, I recommend that you download it seperately in order to save a copy for DR purposes. From time to time new versions of that portlet/theme may be released (or dropped), you'll want to make sure you have everything available in case you have to rebuild your server due to some type of failure.

Liferay has a community following for customizing implementations, if you are looking to enhance your dashboard, you should look at the liferay site to see what options might be available. There is also other types of documentation and help available on liferays site which might be helpful for some Dashboard implementations.

Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.