Table of Contents
Innovative Platform for Teams Meetings to Go in June 2026
According to message center notification MC1296478 (30 April 2026), Microsoft will retire Together mode for Teams meetings in June 2026. It’s a surprising decision that had not been flagged in any way earlier. The effect of the change is that the Together mode option will be removed from the View menu in Teams meetings. Tenants will no longer be able to assign seats to specific users and if a tenant created custom Together mode scenes, they won’t be able to use the scenes any longer. At one point, some very interesting custom scenes were created.
Microsoft says that Teams will focus on the gallery mode as the “primary multi-participant layout for meetings.” It’s a back to the future moment.
Together Mode
When Microsoft introduced Together mode in July 2020, the feature was accompanied by a wave of hyperbole because the new mode seemed to represent an innovative way of bringing people together in an immersive meeting experience. The big thing about Together mode was that instead of appearing in cards arranged in a simple view, a background scene depicting an amphitheater or other space (Figure 1).
The hyperbole was almost inevitable because everyone was in the middle of the awful Covid-19 pandemic, and anything that was different was good, especially if it livened up online meetings. This was a time when Teams usage exploded from 32 million to 145 million monthly active users between March 2020 and April 2021. Teams was the most exciting part of Office 365 in the 2020-2022 period, during which Microsoft shipped hundreds of features and expanded capacity dramatically to satisfy user demand.
Excitement Slipped Away Over Time
Together mode sparked a lot of commentary about how great the feature was, but the fact is that Together mode is the kind of thing that people try once or twice before they conclude that it’s a feature that they don’t need to use. Together mode is rather like avatars in that respect – something to try before slipping back to the normal view. I haven’t attended a meeting that used Together mode in years (for as long as I can remember), and I suspect that many others share the same experience. Maybe it’s just the meetings that I get invited to that deide not to deploy a background to position meeting participants in, but I suspect not.
Together mode seized the imagination of many people without building a loyal base of users, and that’s probably why Microsoft is now removing the feature. There’s no point in having something in the product if no one (or relatively few people compared to the installed base) use it. After all, the engineering effort to maintain Together mode can be used more productively to build yet another Microsoft 365 Copilot feature.
Back to Gallery Mode
Software engineering isn’t perfect and the analysis done to back up the decision to commit to features doesn’t always hold up when exposed to real users. Today’s great feature can turn into unwanted software debris. I don’t know if many will be unhappy about the demise of Together mode. I’m sure that those who will miss gathering in an artificial space will get used to gallery mode. After all, it’s what almost every Teams meeting uses.
So much change, all the time. It’s a challenge to stay abreast of all the updates Microsoft makes across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Subscribe to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook to receive insights updated monthly into what happens within Microsoft 365, why it happens, and what new features and capabilities mean for your tenant.