Microsoft introduced Together Mode in Teams in 2020 to make video meetings more immersive. The company has since then been working on several ideas to improve the feature; the latest one that materialized is the ability to set Together Mode as the default view for all participants in a meeting. Microsoft will add more such features in the future.
As per details provided on the Microsoft 365 Roadmap page, the Microsoft Teams developer team is currently working on a new function in Together Mode to allow meeting organizers or presenters to assign seats to participants. Effectively, meeting organizers will have control over which participant sits where.
Currently, Teams allows you to create a custom scene for Together Mode where you can assign the presenter or meeting organizer a seat, but not everyone else. This will change in the near future, as Microsoft will soon allow organizers to assign seats to participants.
Microsoft is currently targeting those who use Teams on desktop PCs and Mac. The Together Mode improvement will initially be available for these two platforms only. The company is targeting a September release, but it should not surprise us if seat assigning in Together Mode fails to show up in the said month.
While we don"t know which features will be included in Teams in September, Microsoft promised a new Q&A experience and improvements to polls in Teams this month. And hopefully, there are more in the pipeline.
Let us know which of the aforementioned features you find most useful in the comments section.
Source: Microsoft 365 Roadmap