The paper presents first operational experience with the new digital beam position monitoring system for the Swiss Light Source (DBPM). The system permits for the first time to have a single position monitoring system that measures both the slow and the fast aspects of beam position. When set to "slow", the DBPM allows position measurements with high precision, stability and reproducibility and is ideally suited for closed orbit measurements and feedback systems. When set to "fast", the DBPM turns into a powerful beam dynamics tool that permits to extract more dynamic parameters of the beam/machine from turn-by-turn position readings. The key strengths of the system is its programmability that delivers an arbitrary FIR low pass transfer function with a bandwidth spanning from few hundred Hz to over 1 MHz, good reproducibility obtained through the use of a pilot signal and excellent linearity that relies on the direct sampling of the intermediate frequency signal (IF). The core components of the system are the RF front end, the digital receiver and the DSP board and are all housed in a VME crate. The DBPM was developed at Paul Scherrer Institut for the Swiss Light Source in collaboration with the Instrumentation Technologies company.