One of the powerful ways to leverage SharePoint and BPOS's SharePoint Online Standards is with Content Types.  SharePoint Content Types allow you to define a standard set of metadata about individual pieces of content.  In a given Document Library you can have many, many content types.  For example, you might have a library called Customer Documents and within that library you might have three content types - "Contracts"  "Project Documents" and "Time Sheets".  In the Contracts Content Type you would have a set of defined columns. Some of these columsn would be custom - such as "Customer Name" but others you'd pull directly from SharePoint Core Columns such as those having to do with mailing addresses.  As a part of every SharePoint site you should create the content types that you will use with your document libraries. This will allow you to enhance search, workflow, usability, findability and have create views that do the heavy lifting of manual foldering.

In BPOS to get started with content tpes you need to first go and ahead and see what Microsoft has built for you -  to do this go to Site Actions > Site Settings > Site Content Types.

Next - Click on any Content Type - as an example I have created "Proposals" - you probably will not see that option so choose Document. 

Explore the columns that make up the Content Type. Then add a new or add from existing. The next screen shot adds a new column.

Adding a new column is easy - I like to use Calculated Columns from time to time. I am going to use a Calculated Column because I want the "Customer" to display as an aggregate or combination of multiple columns.  This makes for easy viewing - I can combine multiple values into a single text string value.

Here's where I add my formula. The result of this formula will space with spaces "Company Phone Phone" in the Customer field throughout my list.

This is a nice summary - but to work with columns and Content Types you need practice.  Try making a view of your own with your BPOS SharePoint Online Standard sites.

More Reading:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms472236.aspx

I was having a conversation with the Bamboo Solutions folks at their booth at the SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas, NV USA.  We started discussing custom solutions and web parts on BPOS.  Part of SharePoint 2010's core capabilities include the ability of a Site Collection Administrator to upload WSP's.  Obviously there would a huge set of limitations since BPOS Standard is essentially a shared hosting offering built around WSS 3.0 and SharePoint Foundation configured in some varient of Host Header Mode / Host Named Site Collections.  Well BPOS SharePoint 2010 is pretty cool because it brings in a bunch of features from SharePoint Server 2010 including My Sites!  It also brings that custom solution file upload for Site Collection Administrators. The BPOS folks at Microsoft during one of their sessions started discussing the QA/QC process for allowing custom solutions on BPOS-D (dedicated).  Great. Awesome news. But probably the set of limitations is so long that most of us still need to run a non-BPOS SharePoint farm somewhere. 

Well here's the thought for the day - how about BPOS support for BLOB storage? Looking at Storage Point or AvePoint's free blob storage utility this seems like it could be a really interesting combo with S3 or Azure.  I look for all your feedback!

Creating resources such as projectors, conference rooms, or training areas helps reduce double booking and other conflicts.  Exchange Online Services through your BPOS account by Microsoft Online Services allows you to create a shared resource such as a conference room or projector.  Doing so is easy and once created these resources can be seen in both the Outlook desktop client in the calender area as well as in Outlook Web Access (OWA) by setting up a new meeting, adding the resource as an attend and checking the associated free/busy information. 

Here's a short screencast on how to create the resource object in Exchange Online Services.