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Now why can't we find honest reviews like this for most software. Why do customers have to endure this in this age of Gartner magic quadrant/G2 and similarly fawning and often paid for marketing mumbo jumbo.

It has to do with the challenge of evaluating systems like this. The only people who really can understand it are people who are actually implementing and using it at scale and its the nature of their experience that they can't write a review "... I work at company x and after millions of dollars I can honestly say that this product is piece of junk here's a bunch of complaints which dovetail into the heart of our company's business..."

So we'll just have to live with the lone reviewer working in their home lab. "I created mailboxes for my cats and sent them 50 test messages without any hiccups, so Exchange 2019 looks like another winner!"

This is by far the most accurate,no BS description of what MS Dynamics really is. I think it says it all when even Adobe,yes Adobe, has a larger market share of CRM systems than Microsoft...

The thing is that in all my years (~10) as a Dynamics CRM Developer/Consultant I only ever encountered a single bread and butter CRM installation.

D365 is used to provide a large variety of apps hardly any of which are CRM, so the name change actually makes sense for once.

Oh my goodness, after so many years of a love/hate relationship with Dynamics, I feel like I have to defend it a little bit, only a little bit though :)

I must admit that I've not looked at Salesforce since 2014 so I can't really provide a comparison

>* Had to hire a PFE to set up the Exchange integration. This should be turnkey if you are in the same company's stack, IMO. Instead it took thousands of dollars and days of work by the PFE, our centralized Exchange admins, and myself.

I've never had any major issues setting integration with Exchange up. I can't say the same thing for other email servers, I'm looking at you postfix

You do get issues with syncing every so often, YMMV

You do say that you were on Government Cloud so maybe that was the source of the issue, the extra limitations.

>* Little things like hiding the freaking nav bar cards are literally disallowed in Dynamics.

Agreed, these things used to irritate the hell out of me as they seem to be so arbitrary. Although you also have limitations on Salesforce.

>* The Dynamics 365 App for Outlook is a dumpster fire that didn't work at least half the time. Search queries returning no results, no useful error messages, and an overall appalling UX. It single-handedly killed adoption.

Agreed, the old app was a nightmare and I've not tried the new. Hopefully you are referring to the latter.

>* I spent many hours trying to figure out how to send timed emails. That's because you have to use the advanced logic tools which are a nightmare. I was able to spin up the same timed email in SFDC in a matter of minutes. I truly wish this was an exaggeration but it's not.

I'm pretty sure that this is a google search away, set DelayedEmailSendTime. I say this as we had a requirement for this and we implemented it but the customer changed their mind and we went with a bulk email process in the end.

>* D365 documentation is utter garbage when compared to the SFDC Trailhead. The only option for getting off the ground for our technical staff was to pay for training through one of MS's sketchy vendors. It was overpriced (about $3k) and not at all great.

This is a fair criticism. I had a friend whose company landed a Dynamics CRM contract and they struggled to get started precisely because of this. The SDK was fine but they ended up doing all manner of apps with Angular inside Dynamics when they could've used the platform, they just struggled to find out what it could do.

>* The only way to programmatically interface with D365 APIs is through using the ancient SOAP API or their REST endpoint with OData syntax only.

There is an SDK with APIs for C# and Typescript(Javascript) that abstracts this away. If you're using something else then it's not great, I do remember having fun times trying to integrate with Java.

>* Oh BTW, if you were hoping for a modern development workflow, think again. You are going to be stuck manually uploading files into Dynamics for things like editing the internal interfaces of Dynamics. Oh and you have to register every single function against every single trigger, manually through a GUI.

There are so many tools/frameworks out there that this seems like very petty criticism. I was using tools to automate this away back in 2014 (custom but there are frameworks now)

>* Their customer facing website options are a joke. I can create a fully fledged web app with complete control over the HTML/CSS/JS using the SFDC community, this is definitely not the case with Dynamics. You are limited to the point of only being able to choose layout templates with Dynamics. The last time I checked, you couldn't create your own.

MS is pushing powerApps so this is unlikely to change

Good post! Allow me to rebut your rebuttal.

> I've never had any major issues setting integration with Exchange up.

So, this might have been more on our centralized Exchange system. We were integrating D365 with on-prem Exchange. To be fair to us, this was a scenario that was known, documented, and totally within what MS said they could do. To be fair to MS, it's for sure more muddled than configuring online Exchange with D365. Totally open to the possibility that it was our environment that caused the issues as well.

> You do say that you were on Government Cloud so maybe that was the source of the issue, the extra limitations.

Yes, this was a constant headache. To be fair to Dynamics, there were a lot of advantages in the commercial cloud. However, I think my criticisms of the core platform still stand.

> Agreed, these things used to irritate the hell out of me as they seem to be so arbitrary. Although you also have limitations on Salesforce.

Yes, very true. But I can basically mold the admin screens however I want. I can hide/display cards, tabs, and widgets at will.

> Agreed, the old app was a nightmare and I've not tried the new. Hopefully you are referring to the latter.

Very sadly, I'm referring to the newest iteration. Which has significantly less features than the original Outlook app. That app was essentially almost all of Dynamics functionality in Outlook. The new app is significantly more stripped down.

> I'm pretty sure that this is a google search away, set DelayedEmailSendTime.

As a programmatic solution, yes, that would be the appropriate function. To be clear, I was comparing the flow builder in Dynamics to the flow builder in SFDC. My bad for not being as clear as I could.

> This is a fair criticism. I had a friend whose company landed a Dynamics CRM contract and they struggled to get started precisely because of this.

I'm pretty sure if MS improved this alone they would have a better market share!

> There is an SDK with APIs for C# and Typescript (Javascript) that abstracts this away.

Sadly I'm not a great C# programmer. Most of my skill lies in JavaScript. They offer an SDK for JS but it is really not great to use IMO. Anecdotally, most of the people I've talked with who have had success with Dynamics seem to be strong C# devs. Fair enough and not all that unexpected.

> There are so many tools/frameworks out there that this seems like very petty criticism.

Why should I have to use a framework or write a single line of custom code to push code into production for an expensive platform like Dynamics? I really don't think I should have to. I still stand by this criticism because it's unacceptable UX at the price point IMO.

SF provides this out of the box with relatively little setup headache. So in my mind, SF wins this argument hands down.

> MS is pushing powerApps so this is unlikely to change

Yes, their reps were pushing no code/low code hard. The difference with SF is that while they push no code/low code at conferences, they have a real dev tools for people who want more control. I don't feel like this is at all the case with Dynamics. Granted, I did just the one deployment.

Hope you are having success with Dynamics in general!

This could go on but I think the key is that Dynamics 365 is a good platform as long as you have C# developers at the ready to paper over the gaps in the platform. If that's a likely to be deal breaker for you then don't use it, obviously YMMV.

It's only in my last company that we had an actual split between functional consultants and technical consultants, everywhere else it was developers doing ALL the work, so this is never been an issue, but I can see how it could be an issue

MS is pushing citizen developers like crazy, we will see.