We have somewhat of a distributed team, where two of the seven developers work from home. We find that communication is what makes or breaks the success. While, constant pair sessions using desktop sharing and VOIP work very well, the one latest addition has been implementing our own IRC channel. This way all the developers, product managers, etc can see and contribute to the constant flow of communication. Plus we can set it up to log which makes referencing things very nice.

Just thought I would add that to your mix.

Thanks again for the posts!