if you have the right tools... (Score 1)

With the right tools it's almost like being in the office. The team that I'm currently working on is only about 7 large and we're using Scrum. 3 of us don't even live in the same city where our company is HQ'ed (1 is in Vancouver, 1 in London England, the 3rd, myself, about 2.5 hours away).
We have our morning meeting in which we each discuss
a) what we did since our last meeting
b) what we're doing until our next meeting, and
c) what our impediments are
During this time we also go over everybody's burn down chart and track progress.

It's pretty hard *not* to get stuff done when everybody is keeping everybody else accountable. In 6 months we put together an incredibly complex enterprise system that goes from a pda to a laptop, across some web services and into an as/400, complete with a web front end. And it works.

My experience is leading me to believe that telecommuting isn't the culprit for poor productivity - rather it's the lack of appropriate processes and tools. We use Skype and iChat to video conference, desktop sharing and collaborative design tools - this has made remote communication almost as effective as in office communication.