Microsoft is retiring the Together Mode in Teams in favor of something cleaner and simpler
Microsoft Teams is discontinuing its Together Mode feature to simplify meeting layouts. The change aims to streamline the user experience by focusing on more practical meeting views. The new layout will include a cleaner Gallery view and improved options for presentations and content sharing.
- ▪Together Mode was introduced during the pandemic to create shared virtual environments for meetings.
- ▪Microsoft is removing Together Mode to focus on simpler and more effective meeting layouts.
- ▪The new layout will feature a cleaner Gallery view and better options for presentations.
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Story provenance
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| Original publisher | Digital Trends |
| Canonical URL | https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/microsoft-is-retiring-the-together-mode-in-teams-in-favor-of-something-cleaner-and-simpler/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 18 May 2026 13:27:51 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-18T13:44:56.488Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-18T13:44:56.488Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 2lJu0cGpISJj · 3 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Microsoft Teams is retiring one of its more recognizable meeting features, and it might be for the best. The company announced that Together Mode is going away in Teams as Microsoft is shooting towards a simpler set of meeting layouts. To recall, Together Mode was introduced during the pandemic-era video call boom, placing participants inside shared virtual environments such as auditoriums or classrooms. It was a cute idea at the time, but it never became the everyday meeting view for most people. Why Together Mode is being removed Microsoft In the official announcement, Microsoft stated that the change is part of an effort to streamline meeting layouts and make Teams easier to use.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Digital Trends.
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