Content Query Web Part grid

I'm working on a MOSS 2007 development and had a request from the client to display a custom dashboard/web part that showed the status of a number of systems across a number of geographical locations.

My prototype was to use the OOTB Kpi web part, using the red/green/amber as the indicator as to whether the system was online, offline or intermittent.

This resulted in a view of the systems like so:



This presented a problem in that the view would not cater for the same system across multiple locations. What the client wanted was the following:



I used a Content Query Web Part to achieve this layout, I'll talk about how I did this later but firstly I wanted to explain how I set up the lists and security on those lists to allow the different users edit access just to the systems at their location.

The Lists

I started by creating a few custom lists, these were to hold the locations, the system names and the status values.







I then created a list called 'System Status Dashboard' that would use the above 'lookup' lists. I also set about creating a custom content type for this list - the custom content type would look like this:



So we now have a list that contains a list item for each system/location/status plus some additional details like expected resolution and additional comments. To give you an idea of how the list would work here's the form:



I'm out of time for now but will continue this shortly...