[hyperberry]

I worked recently at a hosting company that gave most employees (esp. in-house web designers/developers & marketing staff) very flexible hours. They subscribed to ROWE philosophy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROWE).

Most folks on my team were in the office 2-3 days a week and worked from home F/T other days.

Coordinating/ collaborating/ managing team communications was actually pretty easy and greatly facilitated with AgileZen + HipChat. Access to these web services was the same from office or from home (on different computers & OS platforms), and we used them actively no matter where anybody was at any given time.

One of the dev guys had rigged up HipChat so that notifications from AgileZen (e.g. card completed or on hold) were posted automatically in team chat. HipChat also got auto notifications from GitHub (when somebody merged or pushed new files) and from our build server, TeamCity (when new builds started and finished, or in case of an error).

As an entrepreneur and self-starter, however, the ROWE environment was dissatisfying. I think it's only appropriate for mature professionals -- and most of my coworkers were not. Seemed like most of their "working from home" was spent running errands & attending to side projects. Despite access to fancy collaboration tools, these folks were only really productive when they were at the office.