Force.com IDE - Not Just for Developers

If you’re a Salesforce.com Developer, you probably know all about the Force.com IDE. If you’re a Salesforce.com Administrator dabbling on the dark side of development (S-Controls, Java, Apex and Visualforce), you SHOULD definitely become more familiar with it.

What is the Force.com IDE

What is it? Force.com IDE is a client application that you install on your desktop. It's designed to maximize a developer’s productivity, by providing integrated system components on a single user interface. That means that all of your development, testing, debugging and deployment tools are provided through one simple tool.

"But JP, I'm not a developer ..." Do you redesign page layouts? Do you write workflow rules and validation formulas? Do you create custom objects and custom fields within your Salesforce.com instance, and then deploy these changes to your users? Don't look now, but you're crossing into the dark side, from Administrator to Developer.

Nervous? Don't be. We have cookies!

IDE is an industry standard term, an acronym for "Integrated Developer Environment", or sometimes "Integrated Design Environment". The Force.com IDE is based off of Eclipse, a free software IDE written in Java. While Eclipse was originally designed for developing Java, it also has plug-ins for C/C++, Python, Perl, PHP, and many, many more languages -- including a plug-in for Force.com development. As of the Winter’09 Release, the Force.com IDE has been marked "Generally Available", and is now the development platform of choice among Force.com developers.

Why Is It Cool?

Prior to loading the Force.com IDE, I wrote my Apex code and Visualforce pages inside the Salesforce.com GUI. I was constantly shifting between browser windows when I wanted to look at components, Apex classes, Visualforce pages, and static resources together. With the Force.com IDE, it’s much easier to load up all the code from those different elements, and associate them with a single project. The Package Explorer allows the developer to specify which metadata components are included in the project, which is especially helpful if you have multiple projects being worked on concurrently by different developers. The Online Project Mode is also helpful for such conditions, as it helps developers identify and resolve conflict changes within their Salesforce.com instance.



I really like the Schema Explorer (see above), too. This tool allows developers to view all of the standard and custom objects, their child relationships, object fields – you can even write SOQL queries to view actual data in your organization's instance. With the expanded metadata support in the Winter’09 release, the Force.com IDE has become extremely useful. In addition to Apex classes and triggers, you can download other metadata types, including workflow rules!

Pushing code from the Sandbox to your Production environment is made simple, through the “Deploy to Server” wizard included in the Force.com IDE.

So now you can bang out code, “compile” it (as much as we compile anything, in the SaaS world), test it in your sandbox and deploy to production … all from within one tool. Very cool.

Who should use it?

If you’re doing any Apex development, the Force.com IDE tool is a “must have”. Even if you’re an Administrator, doing heavy customization of objects, workflows, S-controls / Java, and Visualforce, I strongly recommend downloading and becoming familiar with the Force.com IDE tool. You will encounter a learning curve, particularly if you’ve never used an IDE before. In the long run, it will ensure a more secure development and change process for your entire organization, and will become a real time-saver.

Where can I get it?

Download Eclipse here: http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/

Download the Force.com IDE here: http://wiki.apexdevnet.com/index.php/Force.com_IDE_Installation_for_Eclipse_3.3.x

Learn more about the tool here: http://wiki.apexdevnet.com/index.php/Force.com_IDE

Caveat emptor

About a year ago, my company signed a two-year contract with Salesforce.com for 150 Enterprise user licenses. Despite what you’ll read in the rest of this blog, signing a long-term agreement is something I highly recommend other companies take advantage of. With longer term agreements, you can leverage steeper discount pricing. Our 2-year agreement gave us a nice 36% discount off the standard pricing, which certainly made the resident bean-counters happy.

Our 2-year contract is now due for the 2nd annual payment, and Salesforce sent us an invoice. I don’t normally review / approve vendor invoices, but I’m filling in temporarily for my boss. While reviewing the invoice, I noticed a transaction that didn’t seem right: a Customer Web Portal license had been added to the contract. 150 Enterprise licenses, 1 Customer Web Portal license … that’s not right. What is this? I racked my brain, trying to figure out what that was all about – then I remembered:

Earlier this year, my organization was looking into the Customer Web Portal feature. Our Salesforce.com Account Manager hooked us up with a 30-day trial, and we used that time to develop a Customer Web Portal prototype. Unfortunately, the development cycle brought us right up to the end of the trial. Midway through the following month, while trying to provide a demo for a visiting Customer, I discovered that our free Customer Web Portal trial had ended.

In a panic, I called my Salesforce.com Account Manager. I explained our situation, and asked if Salesforce could extend the Customer Web Portal trial. He indicated that he could not do that (Grrr!) – but if I were to purchase a Customer Web Portal license, Salesforce could enable and disable those accounts at any time. Great, sign me up, let me get to my Customer Demo.

There were some technical problems getting the Customer Web Portal active. It took several weeks for Salesforce Customer Support to determine why I wasn’t able to use the licensed Customer Web Portal account, and I lost the opportunity to demo the feature with my end-user. No worries, I continued to use the account for internal demos. Advocating the tool, I tried to build a stronger business case internally by demonstrating the web portal to our Account Teams, Sales, Field Engineers and Executive Management. In August, when it became clear that we would not have funding for the web portal project in 2008, I told Finance to cancel the web portal license.

Fast forward to today. The Customer Web Portal user license was apparently never canceled, and it’s still on the renewal invoice for next year. I opened a Case to get this transaction removed from the invoice. It took 10 days (TEN DAYS!!!) for Customer Service to respond with a canned “we can’t do that, you’re under contract” form letter. I escalated to my Account Manager, and he also indicated there was nothing he could do. Despite what I had been told previously about turning these portal licenses on and off "on-demand", the 1-user Customer Web Portal license agreement was coterminous with our 2-year contract.

Caveat emptor. Never shop on an empty stomach. Read the fine print. Never upgrade in a panic.

I only wanted to cancel a single user license agreement for a feature that we aren’t using, something I was told previously I could do “on demand”. It’s a piddly $300 expense, and while it’s not going to break my bank, it sure does annoy me.

I thought I had a better working relationship with Salesforce. I’m one of their reference accounts: over the past year, I’ve given freely of my personal time, doing private conference calls and impromptu GoToMeeting sessions with some of their prospects -– trying to help Salesforce win new business. I’m the community leader for the local Salesforce.com User Group. I blog and twitter on Salesforce all the time. More importantly, I intercept the NetSuite and Microsoft CRM sales dogs every month, keeping them away from the internal decision makers and coaches in my company.

Am I still a big fan of Salesforce.com? You bet I am! It remains the most flexible, powerful, and innovative SaaS tool on the market. But am I just a little jaded over this silly $300 invoice line item that we couldn't wipe from the slate? You betcha.

How to Show Actual vs. Target on a Dashboard in Salesforce.com

A member of the LinkedIn Salesforce Power Users Group asked, "What is the best way to show Actuals vs. Targets on a dashboard in Salesforce? The only thing I've come up with is using the gauge and setting the max to twice the target. You don't see the target number, but know it is half of the max."

I already answered on the LinkedIn Group, but sometimes it’s just easier to show it in pictures. Todd, this blog’s for you!

Gauges are a good dashboard component to use when you want to identify where you measure in a range of values, or against a Target metric. Here are a couple ideas to get your creative juices flowing:

First, keep in mind that the Gauge has several value settings, but you don’t need to fill in all of them. For example, if you’re only tracking actual vs. target, then you only need to set a single breakpoint value:



Here, the target is $3M in sales, as defined in the Breakpoint #1 Value field. Breakpoint #2 and Maximum values are not set.



As sales opportunities are closed throughout the reporting cycle, the odometer needle will track toward the $3M target. But what happens next? As we push past the $3M Breakpoint #1 Value, the Gauge component is going to display the sum total of all Sales, and Dashboard viewers will lose visibility as to what their Target value was. Todd’s original question (above) implies that he knew this, and wanted to avoid his sales team losing track of what their Target was after they had passed it.

One simple remedy is to reference the Target in the footer or title fields of the component:



Here, we’ve closed a few more sales, pushing us past the $3M Target. Note that the Middle Range Color (Yellow) was never used, because no value was set for Breakpoint #2. Instead, the Gauge component displays the color of the High Range Color (Green). To help Dashboard viewers recall what our goal was, now that we’ve surpassed it, we added the Target: $3M in the Dashboard footer.


Here’s another example that uses all settings in the Gauge component, including Breakpoint #2 and Max Values. The ABC Company has determined that their extended break-even costs for doing business is $47.8M annually. The current Sales Target is $55M; incentive programs for the entire company have been put in place if Sales exceed a Stretch Target of $62M.

Said a different way: Under 47.8M, the company is in the red. After that, their operating in the black, but Sales has a target of 15% over break-even. Finally, if Sales can push the company 30% of Break-Even, it’s party time, and we fly the entire staff down to Bermuda, with families, for the weekend.

Here’s how the component was mapped out in the Dashboard:



Note that we set the Min Value to $43M, rather than $0.00. This creates some interesting display dynamics as the odometer needle moves toward Target:



Through the early part of the reporting period, the needle stays flat, but the red colored section of the gauge dwindles smaller and smaller as the report total approaches the Minimum Value setting. Once we hit the break-even (Breakpoint #1) of $47.8M, we’re no longer in the red. But even though the company is operating in the black, we haven’t yet hit our sales target ($55M).

Why Do You Twitter?

The other day, a colleague noticed my Twitter page, and asked what it was all about. I explained, although rather poorly, I think. He didn't get. He thought it was a distraction and a "complete waste of time".

I confess, when I first started "twittering", I didn't really understand what it was all about either. I now liken the experience to when I was a young teen, and my father brought home a CB radio. He installed it in our kitchen, threw a big antenna on top of the roof, and we listened to all the conversations happening on the citizen's band airwaves. Gradually we became less timid, and joined those conversations, introducing ourselves as the Big Brownie (Mom), the Purple Typewriter (Dad), and the Minnesota Viking (me) -- my sisters never got into CB all that much.

I've had a similar experience on Twitter. At first, after subscribing, I simply lurked -- watching all the Twitter conversations around me. Slowly, I came out of my shell and into the wide Web 2.0 world. Today, I suspect half my Twitter friends are hoping I'll soon crawl back into that shell; I've become a Twitter Maniac!

A quick rewind for my Dad, who follows my blog and points out the many grammar and spelling errors found here (thanks, Dad, lub yew ... mean it!). He's almost certainly asking, "But what IS Twitter?". An explanation is in order. The sidebar on the upper left is an example -- click to enlarge.

Twitter is a conversation on the web. You join Twitter (it's free) at www.twitter.com. You can search for other subscribers, using their Twitter alias (if known) or email address. For example, my twitter alias is jpseabury, and you can follow me from my Twitter home page: http://twitter.com/jpseabury. Just click the "Follow" button under my picture.

Once you follow someone on Twitter, you can monitor all of their tweets from your own Twitter home page. A tweet is a 140-character message that they type into their computer. That message then gets pushed out to all the people who "follow" them.

I found myself navigating to my Twitter home page several times a day, whenever I sat down at my desk, and before checking my email. Later, I found the BeTwittered gadget and added it to iGoogle.com. Now I have auto-updated Twitter conversations constantly streaming to my browser home page. I haven't loaded the TweetDeck yet, but I saw it in action on @colinloretz laptop last week, and may well give it a try.


Following various conversations, I learned that many people were sending tweets from their phones. I did a little exploring and found all types of applications written for web-enabled smart phones (Blackberry, iPhone, etc.). These applications allow subscribers to Twitter "on the move". Stuck in a boring staff meeting? Pull out your smart phone and feign like you're reading eMail -- but catch up on your Twitter conversations instead.

There is, perhaps, a certain amount of voyeurism in all this twittering. Yet, it's also a wonderful tool for learning and networking with other people. Here are some examples:

Through Twitter, I was able to connect with a whole bunch of folks as passionate about the Salesforce.com platform as I am: @judis217, @CRMFYI, @colinloretz, @sonnycloward, @MemeStorm, @gokubi, @arrowpointe, @dschach, @calista_carter and more. At the recent Dreamforce 2008 User Conference, we twittered to each other the entire week, chatting about presentations we were attending or presenting at, where to meet-up for breakfast / lunch / dinner, the wretched Wi-Fi coverage, and the phenomenal presidential election. Through Twitter, we found each other at d'apres conference cocktail parties, banged out Apex code at the Monday Night Hack-a-thon, and sat together at the keynotes. Even when we weren't sitting together (and with approx 9,500 attendees, it was sometimes difficult to find each other), we were chatting to each other over Twitter:

From my Twitter Log at the first Keynote:

@Kingsley2 Sites is really, really powerful.
@gokubi 500K free page views with Enterprise Edition -- great for Non-Profits!
@jpseabury Force.com sites is a game-changer for the industry
@MemeStorm More about Sites here: http://developer.force.com/sites
@Kingsley2 What will people build?
@MemeStorm http://wiki.apexdevnet.com/index.php/Facebook_Toolkit
@dschach #Dreamforce On sign behind Benioff: "r u bored" Haha. Not much audiencew enthusiasm for Facebook here.
@colinloretz I can has facebook queries in Salesforce and can create force.com facebook apps?
@sonnycloward #Dreamforce The Facebook integration could be huge for nonprofit fundraising
@judis217 Is it my imagination or did everyone just say "wha?" at the idea of force.com on facebook. #dreamforce

All these conversations -- to people I hardly knew, but already felt connected to -- made Dreamforce simply more fun.

Before and after Dreamforce, my Twitter network has shared links to news articles they are reading or blogs they have written, all stuff that I'm keenly interested in. I follow them, because they're interests match my own: Force.com, cloud computing, Web 2.0, business intelligence, philanthropy, civics, blogging, and project management.

Through Twitter, I've found speakers for my local Salesforce.com User Group (thanks @lucidera) and rides to the airport. They've shown me tech articles, wiki notes, and development tools that have proven really useful in my daily work ... things like Plone, Jing, Facebook, Friendfeed, TweetDeck, Salesforce Codeshare, Air and Flex toolkits, centraldesktop, Twitterforce, syntax highlighter, and more.

They've helped me debug my code. I posted a problem I was experiencing to a message board, and then followed by posting the same question to my Twitter network -- and I've gotten Twitter replies in minutes. Twitter is invaluable source of information, and helps with my continuing education on all things "in the cloud".

I don't believe every Twitter user will have the same positive experience that I've had. Remember, Twitter is just a conversation that you share on the web. If the only thing you twitter about is the latest gossip, or why you're bored, or what you had for supper last night -- and all the people you follow have similar conversations -- than you probably won't get a lot from Twitter. On the other hand, if you keep your Twitter network filled with interesting and knowledgeable people, you may learn quite a lot.

I've kept my Twitter friends list pretty small. Unlike @guykawaski, I have no interest in picking up throngs of random followers. The twitters I follow are topics I'm interested in. If someone follows me, I'll look at their recent Tweets -- and if the conversation is interesting, I'll return the follow. Together we share, we learn, and we grow.

Aliza Sherman wrote a great article, "How Twitter is a Communications Game Changer". It's worth reading, and pondering how you currently use Twitter, and how you might start using it more effectively.

NOTE: From the blog comments, here's a neat Youtube video about Twitter, recommended by @colinloretz (the "n" is silent). :-)

How Can I Get a Job as a Salesforce.com Consultant?

Several of my LinkedIn contacts have told me they are in the process of leaving their job, or plan to soon, and start working as a Salesforce.com consultants. I've heard from others who are getting laid off, and want advice on landing another Salesforce.com Administrator position like the one they're leaving.

Here's how I advised them:

(1) Best Job Search Tool -- www.Indeed.com
If you're just looking for a Salesforce.com Administrator job -- not necessarily a consulting job -- use Indeed.com. It's the best job search engine out there, in my experience. Enter your zip code, max driving radius, and "Salesforce.com" as the search keyword, and you're off to the races. If you live in a particularly rural area, you may need to widen that driving radius.

(2) Get Certified
All the industry trade rags are reporting that the value and importance of IT certifications is dropping rapidly. All certification programs are seemingly affected, including application development, programming languages, database, web development, networking, and project management. Despite this, I do believe that Salesforce.com Administrator and/or Developer certification are worth getting. The SaaS industry is comparatively new and the technology is changing rapidly. Certification demonstrates that you're part of its evolution and that your head is in the clouds.

(3) Network, Network, Network
It's not what you know, it's who you know. Social networking is the key to future career options. Visit the Salesforce.com Community website and find a user group in your area. Join, participate, and meet other professionals like you -- some may be hiring. If there isn't a local user group, talk to your Salesforce.com Account Manager about starting one.

While on the Salesforce Community website, check out the message boards. Not just the "Jobs" message board, but all of the message boards. See what other users are talking about and/or struggling with. Can you help them? Do it! Strive to become a "Trusted Contributor" within the community by responding to user questions and issues. You'll earn name recognition and reputation, two powerful assets for career growth.

(4) Updated Your LinkedIn Profile
If its been awhile since you've updated your LinkedIn profile, go clean it up now. While you're there, subscribe to the following LinkedIn User Groups: Salesforce.com, Salesforce Developers / Contractors, Salesforce Consulting Network, and Salesforce Professional Network. Don't just join and lurk ... network, network, network! Participate in the discussions.

(5) Donate Your Expertise
Ask your Salesforce.com Account Manager how you can get involved with the Salesforce.com Foundation. There are a lot of non-profit organizations out there who could use the talents of skilled administrators and developers. You don't even need to be local to the non-profit entity in order to help them. I've done full data migrations, deployment customizations, and custom apps for non-profit organizations scattered all over the country. Afterall, Salesforce is web technology, and we're all on the same internet. Generally, the work is pro-bono, which may be less feasible if you're currently jobless. However, if you can afford to donate a few hours a week, this can be a great way to put your consulting talents to practice. I can tell you from first hand experience, it is incredibly rewarding to donate your services to these organizations.

(6) Learn from the Masters
If you already know a lot about Salesforce.com, but aren't quite sure if you're ready to start your own consulting business, consider learning at the heels of the Masters. Find a consulting organization that is hiring, and submit your resume to join their team. It's not as flexible as working for yourself, but it can be a great way to learn the ropes from mentors and peers. If you follow my previous recommendations, you'll find these Masters out there soon enough -- they blanket the message boards and user groups with offers to help struggling user communities.

Get your head in the clouds, your dream Salesforce.com job is out there!

Are These Buttons Too Sexy?

I love Steve Andersen's Salesforce.com-ish Button Creator. It makes buttons that have a similar look and style as the standard buttons created through the Salesforce.com user interface.

When I lost track of the URL to his button maker, however, I searched Google for some button-making goodness ... and found a few interesting sites.

The buttons on the lower portion of this screenshot come from www.buttongenerator.com. Very sexy, n'est pas?

Unfortunately, they're just a little TOO sexy. In order to make these buttons not look out of place, I'll have to spruce up the rest of the page -- maybe bring in some pretty graphics via the Google API, like Sam has been doing over on his Salesforce blog.

Customer Satisfaction Survey Card for Hotel Nikko, San Francisco CA

This year, while attending Dreamforce 2008, I stayed at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco. Overall, it's a very nice hotel, although a bit too lavish for my taste. The spacious lobby featured soothing waterfalls running alongside marble staircases, a concierge with a lilting British accent (and really tight, curve-hugging slacks), and gorgeous cherry wood furniture. The room had a large floor to ceiling window with a great view of the city, was reasonably sized and very clean. What's not to love?

Maybe I'm overly provincial, but I associate extravagance with excess and waste. When traveling, I normally go for the Motel 6 flavor. Cheap, economical and comfortable -- for a place that you're mostly just using to get a few hours of sleep. I'd normally drive right past the fancy schmancy Hotel Nikko with it's $210 per night room rate (and that's with my Dreamforce and AAA membership discount) -- unless I was trying to impress my date.

I assumed that any hotel in the middle of the city was going to be charging high rates. Certainly, all the hotels on the Dreamforce pre-registration list were in that price range. I figured that was just the price of a typical room in the city. So I was a little surprised to open the curtains in my hotel room, and see a large sign hanging from a hotel across the street: $55 per night. Ah well, it was too late to cancel my reservation at the Nikko ... I was checked in and unpacked. I opted to stay where I was and splurge for the week.

The difference between these two hotels, aside from the $155 / night price difference and aforementioned decor? Not as much as I'd hoped.

Hotel Nikko didn't have a Customer Satisfaction survey card for me to fill out, so I'll just have to blog it:

WiFi: FAIL
For $210/night, you’d think I’d be able to jump on to the internet for free, right? All of the public WiFi connections were blocked, and my only option was to subscribe to the In-Room WiFi connection … at $12.99 per night! Internet Highway Robbery! I couldn't justify spending that amount of money for 2-3 hours of internet usage (that's how many hours I planned on being in my room during the conference, across 5-days, awake and idle). Ergo, no blogging until I got home.

Comfort: FAIL
The room was beautiful, I'll certainly admit that. Large king-sized bed, big fluffy pillows (about 8 of them, 7 of which I had to throw on the floor each night ... because who needs that many pillows on their bed?), gorgeous wall-mounted flat screen TV, lots of mirrors, big roomy bathroom. But the bed was soooooooo uncomfortable; I tossed and turned all night long. Some of that was due to the time change, I'm sure. My body never really acclimated to the 3-hour time zone change and 1-hour shift to daylight savings. My eyes popped open at 4:00am each morning, and I never really got back to sleep. After a week of this, I’m utterly exhausted.

Technology: FAIL
The programming on the TV Remote Control was teh suck. This was the week of the 2008 presidential election, and I really wanted to channel surf all the networks to catch their coverage of this historic event. I was thwarted by the Hotel Nikko Remote Control.

Here is the remote control button combination I had to press to get CNN: POWER, MENU, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, RIGHT, SELECT.

Seriously. There was no way to select a channel number directly. You had to navigate through a mass of fee-based programs (movies, porn, and three screens of other crap) to find the free channel television networks. Even worse, once you were on a normal television channel, you couldn’t cycle to the next channel. You had to go back to the MENU option, and start all over from the beginning. So I couldn't pop from CNN to ABC, to CBS, to FOX, to NBC, to local ... it was just CRAZY!

Oh, and the fee-based movies? It cost me $14 to see Hancock, which I'd missed at the theatres and wanted to see. $14 ... that's twice what you'd pay to see it on a real movie screen. Yowzers.

Ammenities: OK
There was a 16 oz bottle of water at the bedside, a cylindrical, new age container – looked pretty cool. But it if you wanted to drink from it, you were charged $6.00. Hello? The 1-liter bottle that I bought at the airport (still over-priced at $3.75) was filled with water that came from the same bottling company – how does Hotel Nikko justify charging that much money for that little water?

So why isn't this category a FAIL? I gave this one a passing “OK” grade, because the room did come with a free iron, ironing board, hair dryer, coffee maker, and coffee. I didn't use any of these, but it was nice to see I didn’t have to swipe a credit card to use them.

I did appreciate the New York Times dropped daily at my door.

Environmental Conscious: FAIL
Hotel Nikko had signs posted in the bathroom, asking patrons to help with the hotel's efforts to "Go Green". If you planned to re-use your bathroom towel, just hang it from the hook on the back of the door. I'm a eco-concious American, so I did that. Every morning. And yet, every morning Housekeeping took my towel from the hanger, and replaced them with fresh, clean ones.

A little card on the bed stand read, “Leave this card on your pillow if you want your sheets changed. Otherwise, leave it on the bed stand and we will leave your current sheets. Thank you for helping us Go Green”, or words to that effect. Housekeeping stripped my bed each morning and changed the sheets (don't ask me how I know, I won't confess; what happens in San Francisco stays in San Francisco).

The first day, I left a $3 tip for Housekeeping, and the gal came and thanked me personally. I had the impression that not many people leave tips for Housekeeping these days. I wonder if the reason she kept making my bed with clean sheets and replacing towels was because of those tips.

Security: FAIL
I liked the in-room security safe. After all my other experiences, however, I was surprised I didn’t have to stuff quarters into it in order to make it work.

The FAIL grade on security came Tuesday night, when I finished my dinner, reached for my wallet ... only to find I didn't have it on me. I had accidentally left my wallet (and room key) in my hotel room! My waitress at the nearby diner was gracious enough to let me run back to the hotel (I left my Blackberry as a collateral hostage). Once at the hotel, I approached the front desk clerk and explained my situation. She asked for my room number, confirmed my last name, and gave me a new room key.

Huh? No “please confirm your mother’s maiden name”, or “do you know the last 4 numbers of the credit card you reserved with?”, or “This is Bruno from our Security Staff. He’ll accompany you to your room and let you in. Once there, he’ll need to see your ID before we can give you a replacement room key.”

I appreciate getting a replacement room key (and my wallet) so easily. I was able to rush back across the street to clear my dinner tab. But the lack of security is a little concerning.

I should have tried the same thing the next night … "Hi, my name is Sonny Cloward, and I’ve left my wallet in my room … " =)

Overall, I enjoyed my stay, but I’m disappointed at the lack of amenities that come with the 4-night $620 price difference between Hotel Nikko and the dive across the street. I think next year I’ll stay at the dive, and that $620 I save can go toward something meaningful. Like getting Calista Carter hooked up with a phone she can Twitter from!