Microsoft Teams is retiring one of its most recognizable pandemic-era meeting features.
Together Mode, the layout that placed participants into shared virtual scenes, will no longer be available beginning June 30, 2026.
For admins, the change is less about nostalgia and more about cleanup. Together Mode scenes, custom scenes, and seat assignments are going away, while gallery view becomes the main multi-participant layout for Teams meetings.
The shared-scene era is ending
Microsoft said in a Microsoft 365 Insider post that retiring Together Mode is part of a move to simplify meeting layouts, reduce behind-the-scenes complexity, and focus engineering work on video quality, stability, and performance.
Together Mode launched in July 2020, when video meetings were still becoming the default workday backdrop for many organizations. The feature used AI to isolate each participant’s head and shoulders from their background and place them into a shared scene, such as a conference room, auditorium, or custom-branded space.
That visual layer is what disappears. According to The Verge, the Together Mode toggle will be removed from the View menu as the change rolls out. Together-specific features, including scenes and seat assignments, will go with it.
A post on the Microsoft 365 Message Center Archive says that gallery view will remain the primary meeting layout.
Gallery mode does not recreate the shared-room look or custom options. It does, however, keep multi-participant meetings inside the layout Microsoft plans to maintain across Teams clients.
Microsoft has been adding more meeting intelligence elsewhere in Teams. Recent updates have included Copilot features, interactive meeting agents, smarter recaps, and SharePoint sharing across Teams and Microsoft 365.
Admins should clean up before the cutoff
Organizations that never used Together Mode may not even notice the retirement.
The affected group is narrower: tenants that built custom scenes for internal events, used branded spaces for all-hands meetings, or relied on seat assignments for structured presentations.
Those setups should be reviewed before June 30. Admins should inventory custom Together Mode scenes, identify recurring meetings or templates that use the feature, and alert event organizers who may still expect those layouts to work.
Background blur and gallery mode remain available for ordinary meeting needs. Spotlight can still bring a specific speaker’s video forward for the whole meeting, which may replace some presentation use cases tied to seat assignments. None of those options preserves the shared-scene effect, so teams that used custom Together Mode scenes for visual branding will need a different plan.
Teams admins should also remove Together Mode from documentation, event runbooks, and training materials. If a recurring meeting or webinar template still points users to the retired view, the June cutoff could create confusion during live events.
The retirement also fits a broader shift in Microsoft’s 2026 product direction. The company is moving AI deeper into workplace tools, including Teams, Windows, and Edge.
For Teams admins, the next step is straightforward: treat Together Mode as retired infrastructure, not a user preference to revisit later. Update meeting templates, brief organizers, and move affected meetings to supported layouts before the feature disappears.
Also read: Our Microsoft Copilot cheat sheet explains the versions, pricing, and business benefits.
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