Microsoft has officially announced the deprecation of the Together mode feature in Microsoft Teams, with the retirement effective June 30, 2026.
The decision, communicated by Product Manager Katarina Tranker via the Microsoft 365 Insider blog, marks a significant shift in the platform’s meeting layout strategy, prioritizing performance, device compatibility, and engineering focus over feature diversity.
Together mode, which placed meeting participants in a shared virtual environment such as an auditorium or classroom, will be fully discontinued across all Teams platforms.
Microsoft to Retire Teams Together Mode
Alongside the feature itself, Microsoft is retiring:
- The Together mode toggle from the meeting View menu
- All scenes and custom scenes, including personalized seat assignments
- Organization-branded scenes previously used for corporate identity during meetings
Organizations that relied on custom scenes for brand presence are being directed toward organization-provided branded backgrounds, including frosted glass options deployable via the Teams Admin Center.
According to the announcement, Teams has accumulated multiple overlapping layout options Gallery, Large Gallery, Together mode, and dynamic views over the years. While this variety offered flexibility, it introduced compounding drawbacks:
- Increased cognitive load for end users navigating layout options mid-meeting
- Fragmented experience across desktop, web, mobile, and Teams Rooms devices
- Platform implementation complexity that slowed cross-platform improvements
By consolidating around a single modern Gallery view, Microsoft aims to streamline both the user interface and its internal engineering pipeline.
The Gallery view currently supports up to 49 simultaneous participant video tiles. It dynamically scales the tile count and size based on device capabilities, effectively covering the core visibility use case for which Together mode was originally designed.
Performance and Quality Improvements
The retirement is being framed not just as a removal, but as a reallocation of engineering investment. Microsoft states that eliminating the Together mode rendering pipeline will free service capacity to accelerate development of:
- Super-resolution video enhancement
- AI-based denoising for cleaner audio-visual output
- Improved color accuracy across meeting environments
For users on modest hardware, the adaptive Gallery is expected to reduce video choppiness by preventing the tile count from exceeding the device’s rendering capacity, a common complaint on lower-end machines running Together mode’s heavier scene-rendering engine.
Microsoft recommends the following Gallery-based alternatives to replicate Together mode’s collaborative feel:
- Pinning specific participants to keep key speakers consistently visible
- Spotlighting directs all attendees’ attention to a presenter
- Branded backgrounds are enforced organization-wide through Teams Admin Center policies
- Dual display configurations to separate participant feeds from shared content
The removal of Together mode will follow Teams’ standard safe-deployment process, rolling out progressively across platforms. Users enrolled in the Targeted Release or Public Preview channels may encounter the change ahead of the general June 30 deadline.
Microsoft is advising IT administrators to monitor the Microsoft 365 Message Center for platform-specific and cloud-specific rollout timing to plan internal communications and background policy deployments accordingly.
The retirement reflects a broader Microsoft strategy of reducing feature sprawl in Teams in favor of a leaner, higher-performance meeting infrastructure ahead of anticipated AI-driven video feature releases later in 2026.
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