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!