Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this. As someone who has been working remotely for the past 3 months i can say that it works if the people involved want it to work. I have been doing scrum, with 2 week sprints and daily standup meetings via Skype, plus any required planning/retrospective meetings also via VOIP and it just works. Whenever i need to talk to a colleague i do it via email, IM, or Skype, depending on the severity/level of understanding of the issue and so far it has been pretty much the same as being there, apart from missing the work-environment-typically-awesome sarcastic jokes, that is :) The greatest challenge, IMHO, is to find people who can make the system work :)