<p>Microsoft today announced that it has completed the first step towards pervasive interoperability between Skype and Lync. In this initial stage, the firm has enabled contact federation and audio calling and instant messaging between the two services.</p><p>"We are thrilled to announce the availability of Lync-Skype connectivity," Microsoft director BJ Haberkorn writes in a post to the Lync Team Blog today. "This marks our first important step in extending Lync's unified communications capabilities to the hundreds of millions of people who use Skype. This combination enables Lync customers to take advantage of the global reach of Skype to connect and collaborate with suppliers, customers, and partners while relying on the enterprise richness of Lync."</p><p>As you probably know, Skype is Microsoft's semi-autonomous consumer-oriented communications service, which the firm is busy integrating into every viable product imaginable, including Windows 8, Windows Phone, Office, and Xbox One. Lync, meanwhile, is Microsoft's corporate communications services, a sort of business-oriented alternative to Skype.</p><p>In February, Microsoft announced it would connect the services so that Skype and Lync users could interoperate across both. I wrote about this in Hey, You Got Your Skype in My Lync. This combination will happen over several stages through the first half of 2014, and today's updates represent the first step.</p><p><a href="http://winsupersite.com/skype/microsoft-announces-first-step-skypelync-interoperability">Keep reading...</a></p>