Microsoft is retiring a Teams feature next month

Microsoft has announced the phased retirement of Together Mode beginning June 30, alongside several related experiences.

Teams is Microsoft's premier product for online communication and collaboration, and it is heavily used in enterprise and school environments. We recently covered all the new features that the Redmond firm added to Teams in April and also detailed a couple of new capabilities coming to the software. Now, Microsoft has issued a notification about the retirement of a Teams feature.

Starting from June 30, Microsoft is getting rid of Together Mode in Teams. Some may remember that this feature was released back in July 2020, and it essentially places all participants in a shared background, giving the impression that they are present in the same room. It was quite popular during the COVID-19 pandemic when remote and hybrid working was relatively more common, and this social aspect of Teams was more of a necessity than an add-on. Microsoft updated Together Mode several times in the past few years.

As a part of this retirement, scenes, custom scenes, and seating assignments are being killed off too. Customers who used custom backgrounds to showcase their branding can instead leverage branded backgrounds, which are specifically for this purpose.

Microsoft hopes that this change will simplify the meeting experience, reduce engineering complexity, decrease cognitive load for the end-user, lower fragmentation across device experiences, and allow the company to invest in other, more important areas like video quality, stability, and performance.

The tech firm has emphasized that a suitable alternative for Together Mode is Gallery View, which essentially allows up to 49 participants to be placed in the same virtual space. It's a modern implementation which scales video tiles based on various factors, including device specifications. Customers are also encouraged to utilize other features like spotlight, pinning, branded backgrounds, and dual displays (when available).

Microsoft will begin removing Together Mode in a phased manner, starting from June 30. Targeted and Public Preview customers will see it being retired earlier than others.