Groove officially announces the Groove Development Kit 3.0 that gives developers three flexible options for creating and deploying Groove-powered solutions:

Forms-based Groove Workspace Explorer tool solutions – Business process solutions (e.g. incident tracking, customer tracking) created and deployed using the Forms tool that run within Groove Workspace Explorer and may operate alongside other Groove tools;

Custom Groove Workspace Explorer tool solutions – Custom tools developed using the Groove Toolkit for Visual Studio .NET that run within Groove Workspace Explorer and may operate alongside other Groove tools; and

Web services solutions – Solutions deployed as discrete applications that consume some or all Groove virtual office capabilities via a comprehensive Web services API.

Searchdomino.com : A conversation with Ray Ozzie

Notes was revolutionary because it was fundamentally different. It gave workers a new way to collaborate. Do you expect Groove to achieve those same levels of innovation?

Ozzie: Notes is really made up of two fundamental things: the mail infrastructure and a collaborative rapid application development infrastructure. Groove does not have something equivalent to mail, which was a big thing driving Notes into many organizations. But in terms of a collaborative solutions platform, I think that Groove is going to have a much greater impact than Notes, specifically because it's starting at the edge, and it's much easier to deploy. [It's for businesses] that need to deal with problems in another organization or that need to deal with a highly mobile workforce without mating large scale enterprise infrastructure decisions in order to get value returned very quickly.

Russ Lipton : If I were younger and still doing the computer thang, I would be deeply engaged with Groove, even though it is a decade-long quest still in its early stages ...

ZDNet : Microsoft says no to venture investing

Currently, Microsoft has investments in only about three or four small companies, he said. One is Groove Networks, founded by Lotus Notes Creator Ray Ozzie.

Another tool I've been testing recently is Shinkuro. It's a bit similar to Groove in it's approach of P2P Collaboration (shared folders and secure, contextual chat) but it's much more lightweight, it runs on all platforms and the current version is free to use. The software has got a somewhat outdated look and feel but once you get the hang of it it's very easy to use and remarkably fast. Shinkuro is a welcome addition to our company as we have an increasing number of projects in which we are collaborating with people using Macs and Linux.

Neil Finlayson sees a great future for a combination of Groove and Skype. Last week I had a short call with Neil using Skype and I must say that it's a very impressive tool that I probably will be using a lot more in the near future.

Jon Udell takes an extensive look at Groove 3.0.

Groove's transacted/synchronized storage model envisions a species of applications that don't yet exist outside of Groove. Likewise its hyperlinking model envisions collaborative scenarios that don't yet flourish outside of Groove. Such applications and scenarios would present thorny usability challenges even if there were no legacy to consider, because the total experience is so different from what we're conditioned to expect. Of course there is a legacy. Reconciling it with Groove is incredibly hard, but there's been steady progress all along, and V3 is another big push forward.