Don't forget rollback. That has saved us a number of times. One of the things I like about Octopus is rather than deploy over the existing instance it deploys

Don't forget rollback. That has saved us a number of times. One of the things I like about Octopus is rather than deploy over the existing instance it deploys a version alongside. Then if everything is hunky-dory with the deployment process it simply tweaks IIS to point at the new deloyment folder. I don't believe that MSDeploy does that. I think it just overwrites the existing source. Also, can MSDeploy deploy to multiple servers? Anyway, Octopus is very neat and tidy. We also recycle app pools and restart windows services using Powershell scripts as deployments out of Octopus for some legacy apps that don't support distributed caching and the cache is stale. It's quick an dirty but it works.