Spindlemedia and Octopus Deploy

Their Story

Spindlemedia provides a complete suite of products to automate virtually every task in the tax office. Spindlemedia provides Texas tax collection offices with a platform built upon a tiered client/server framework using Microsoft development and solutions tools. Through this technology, the end-user is provided with real time information and the functionality to process, scan, input and print at their workstation. TaxOffice 3.0 eliminates the need for spreadsheets and manual tracking of data because of its extensive list of reports for most purposes. It also allows for the automation of supplemental loads and mortage tapes, eliminating the manual entry of each account.

How did you deploy software before using Octopus?

We are a small company of seven people with close to 30 customers that we would manually deploy software to. We hardly ever deployed software, we had no idea what versions anyone was on, and there was no real standard of how we deployed software. It was awful. Everything was done manually. Files were uploaded to FTP and downloaded at the customer site and manually installed. There was no real documentation on how things should be installed. Database updates were done by taking a database snapshot for each customer, uploading it to FTP, running a comparison at our office and then applying the update scripts. Due to the complexity and time involved, some clients would go a year or two without updates unless it was critical. We also had no idea what version of our software our clients were running unless we logged onto them and checked.

How has using Octopus improved the way you deploy software?

Octopus has given us a lot of visibility into what versions of software clients are on and lets us get new features (and bug fixes out) much more quickly than we ever could have before. We were at the limits of what we could do before. Now we can scale and take on more customers without adding to our workload.