Teams Essentials users login issue resolved

Question

Hi, I tried to reply to a previous post but it has been closed now, I had the exact same issue but have managed to work it out so wanted to post it here for anyone in the future.

This was the original question:

Hi Microsoft Community, I am having an issue with users logging into Teams getting prompted to start a trial using Teams Exploratory. The initial Teams Essentials license which was bought through a reseller expired and new licenses were bought directly through Microsoft. All the users have the new Teams Essentials licenses assigned, however when they login from either the new Teams app or a browser, they get prompted to start a trial. Can you please advise on how I can get the users to use the assigned license rather than the trial?

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/4425113/teams-essentials-users-login

Now I am unsure if their issue is the same as mine however the experience was the same. After a lot of digging and work with Chat GPT I found that Microsoft actually sell two licences with the name 'Microsoft Teams Essentials', to make it worse they are exactly the same price, however they function completely differently.

In my instance we were using Entra (Formerly AAD) however we had bought the MSA version of the licence originally.

According to Chat GPT:

An MSA (Microsoft Account) is a personal/consumer identity — the sort of account used for Outlook.com, Xbox, consumer OneDrive, Microsoft Store, etc. Microsoft describes MSA as its single-sign-on service for Microsoft accounts. A Microsoft Entra ID account is an organisational identity belonging to a specific tenant. Your accounts such as: ******@tennantname.onmicrosoft.com exist as user objects inside your Entra tenant. Their authentication, licences, groups, Conditional Access and Microsoft 365 resources are associated with that tenant.

With the MSA licence, when logging in via the web browser based Teams app we were getting redirect to the 'Sign in'/'Join a meeting' screen, via the Windows based Teams app we were getting a 'Welcome to your trial' popup.

We have since changed the licences to the other type and it is now fully working. I hope if anyone has this issue in future they come across this and resolves their issue!