I had to go to Bainbridge Island for work last Friday afternoon. It was Valentine’s Day weekend, so I decided to kill two birds with one stone and invite my wife. She, of course, decided to invite our dog.

Speaking of dogs, my team is dogfooding the Microsoft Online Services Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), which includes Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Communications Online, and Live Meeting. This means that all my e-mail, SharePoint sites, presence indications and secure IM communications are provided by BPOS and they’re available from anywhere that I can reach the Internet.

Anyway, while hanging out in our hotel on Saturday night eating Safeway sandwiches and watching the Olympics (because we couldn’t leave the dog alone), I got the urge to work on a document that was due on Monday. My laptop is my only computer, so I grabbed it, connected to our hotel’s wireless network, opened the Sign-In application, and clicked My Company Portal. From there, I clicked on our team’s SharePoint Online site and started editing the document. While accessing the doc, the integrated presence indicators showed me that a few other folks on our team were working on the weekend too.

I found a few unexpected questions that I had to get answered before I could finish the doc. Office Communicator is always running on my laptop, so I took a look at my team contacts and noticed that Damien was available. He’s one of those guys with the answers to almost every question, so I pinged him and, sure enough, he was able to help. I finished the document before Apolo Ohno won his silver medal, and checked it back in to our SharePoint Online site. I sent an e-mail to my boss via Exchange Online with a link to the doc to let him know it was ready, and then scheduled a Live Meeting for Monday morning to review the doc with some team members in Boston.

It’s important to understand that I was able to do all this without the hassle of creating a VPN or initiating a remote desktop session. With BPOS, I can work from anywhere; all I need is an Internet connection. My user experience was exactly the same as it is every day at work, except that I was propped up in my hotel room with my wife and our dog. I’ve been in this business long enough to appreciate just how amazing and how cool this really is!