Remote work and distributed teams provides one heck of a challenge for sure. We've been finding our way by trying different things and succeeding or failing - but I certainly agree with what Jeff Atwood said about keeping up with chat and mail lists... We're very cross-platform, so video chat doesn't work all that well for us across Linux, Windows, and Mac, etc... But I think the weekly status reports to the team has been forgotten, so we'll have to start that up again. :)

I did a presentation for EclipseCon 2010 about our challenges that you can find here (with links to a slide): http://www.eclipsecon.org/2010/sessions/sessions?id=1156

Great article though. Today it's nearly impossible to avoid a distributed team to get stuff done!