The company declared the discontinuation of ‘Together Mode’ in Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft is discontinuing Together mode in Microsoft Teams.
Credit: Microsoft
Microsoft Teams is losing a feature launched during the peak of remote work in the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Microsoft, the company is saying “goodbye” to Together mode in Microsoft Teams and moving to a simpler layout experience.
Microsoft Teams, part of the Microsoft 365 suite, is a cloud-based platform used for communication and collaboration, offering messaging, file sharing, and Zoom-like video conferencing.
In the summer of 2020, when remote work was at its peak amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Microsoft introduced Together mode to help users feel like they were sitting in the same room with everyone else in the meeting or class. The feature removed the background for every user on a video meeting, placing them in a virtual room, effectively giving everyone a shared background as if they were in the same space.
An example of Together mode that Microsoft provided when the feature was first introduced in July 2020 can be seen in the image at the top of the article.
Microsoft says it is removing Together mode because it increases cognitive load for users, fragments the meeting experience across desktop, web, mobile, and Teams Rooms, and adds implementation complexity across platforms.
“Today, the core need Together mode was designed to support, namely seeing the people who matter in a meeting, can now be fully met by the modern Gallery view, which can display up to 49 participants at once,” Microsoft said in its announcement.
Microsoft Teams will now focus on Gallery mode as the view option in video conferencing. This is the traditional boxed view in video meetings, popularized by Zoom. Microsoft says doing so will simplify the meeting interface, deliver higher and more stable video quality across meetings, and free up service capacity that can be reinvested into foundational video improvements.
Microsoft also announced removing scenes and custom scenes, including seat assignments, along with Together mode in Microsoft Teams.