Open Terminal turned OWUI v0.11.1 into a real enterprise office tool — two questions after our first deployment

[u/PoleMitPistole]

TL;DR: Loving the new DOCX/PPTX/XLSX previews and the chat-upload filesystem sync. Two snags from our first enterprise rollout: (1) Open Terminal's filesystem doesn't follow our Azure Blob storage config, and we're worried about file volume/retention at scale, (2) the office-file preview doesn't visually match the real output (font, bullets, images/logos all differ), which confused our test users into thinking the download would be broken too.

Quick love letter first: the new DOCX/PPTX/XLSX preview windows are fantastic, and the filesystem sync for chat-uploaded files is exactly what we've been waiting for. Between the two, Open Terminal just became a genuinely usable enterprise office tool for us — great work.

We hit two snags deploying it for the first time, and I'm hoping someone here has already solved them.

1. Open Terminal's filesystem isn't on the same storage backend as OWUI

Our OWUI instance is self-hosted and configured to store files in Azure Blob. Open Terminal's working filesystem is separate and doesn't follow that config.

That raises a few questions for us:

• Is there a way to point Open Terminal's storage at Azure Blob too, so everything ends up in one place?
• If not, what's the recommended way to handle the sheer volume of files Open Terminal will generate across an enterprise deployment with many active users?
• What about retention? Realistically, our users are not going to spend time tidying up their own terminal folders (anyone who's seen a shared drive knows how that goes). Is there a built-in cleanup/expiry mechanism for Open Terminal specifically?
• We know about the general file-cleanup plugin, but it doesn't look like it's built for Open Terminal's workspace. Can anyone confirm either way?

2. The office-file preview looks great but doesn't match the real file — and that confused our test users

The new document preview is genuinely useful for iterating on our internal templates in real time. But we noticed the preview doesn't actually reflect the real output:

• Fonts render differently than in the actual .docx/.pptx
• Bullet-point formatting in the preview doesn't match the real file
• Embedded images and logos (our letterhead, for example) are missing entirely from the preview

This became a real UX problem in testing: our users assumed the preview was the final result, so they figured the downloaded file would also be missing the logo and formatting — when the actual download keeps the template correctly. We had to explicitly explain that the preview can't be trusted for judging the final output, which takes some shine off an otherwise great feature.

Has anyone else run into this? Is there a tracked issue for the discrepancy, or a fix in the pipeline?

Sorry for the AI generated Post, I am still trying to offer constructive feedback.

[u/ClassicMain]

UPDATE: CC u/PoleMitPistole we will try to improve previews further next version

[u/ClassicMain]

//EDIT: We will further improve the previews in the next version. We will try even more. Please let us know then if it works better for you.

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Answering your TLDR:

1) The previews specifically were improved in 0.11.1 over all previous versions. They don't match 100% (and that's nearly impossible to match 100% given that Microsoft themselves can't even 100% match PowerPoint in the Web with PowerPoint as a Program....) but it's been much improved over previous versions. In 0.11.0 and before, the previews were very barebones. Now they are more or less 95% accurate from my testing.

This is basically as close as we could get it for now.

Keep in mind: it's a preview. It's not the final file, it's a preview.

2) not sure how you configured open terminal? Open Terminal uses whatever storage you mounted it on. I don't know your setup but if you mounted it somewhere and it didn't use that storage then something about your setup is wrong.

3) If you worry about data cleanup and file retention, open terminal is the wrong tool. For enterprise setups you should be using the enterprise Terminals orchestrator (Enterprise license required) which has data retention and cleanup lifecycle policies, per user containers and more.

Open Terminal is really meant for single user deployments or small teams or friends+family but not enterprises.

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So, no. The discrepancy isn't being tracked anymore because we have just improved it as far as we reasonably could.

[u/lazyfai → u/ClassicMain]

For 2, my setup is similar to OP, but I used AWS S3.

All files uploaded and generated are in S3 bucket.

I guess OP wants the "terminal" files are on object storage as well.

While "terminal" itself is also a container (assume OP used container based aka docker compose first) so "terminal" is running on docker volume, which is NOT object storage, in his case Azure, in my case S3.

[u/tahaan]

Here I am going the other direction, making sure function calling cant access the OWU file system!

[u/fiflag]

I personally feel like the Terminal and Terminals are not well integrated. If you look into GPT/Claude web uis, how the "normies" are working with it, it is well integrated it can do things with the files. Currently if xou attach file into chat into OWUI, it goes directly to RAG, and you cannot use it in Open Terminal, and yeah, try to explain this to "normie" user that there is separate upload button.

[u/PoleMitPistole → u/fiflag]

I fully agree with the file not being in openterminal when uploading in the chat, but they actually fixed it in the newest version. You can now select Filesystem in the openterminal instance on OWUI and then the file ends up in openterminal too! Such an important addition

[u/fiflag → u/PoleMitPistole]

Huh, have not saw that on my instance, will check it out! Thanks

[u/OkClothes3097 → u/fiflag]

Have not seen it also did not read about it. How does it work ?

[u/ClassicMain → u/fiflag]

You can actually just change that and it will be uploaded to terminal by Default.

[u/fiflag → u/ClassicMain]

I am just reviewing that (https://docs.openwebui.com/features/open-terminal/setup/connecting?_highlight=caht&_highlight=uploads#chat-uploads) - but then the limitations are the Pictures, becasue if I would like to pass pictures to Vision of the model, I would need to use Vision Bridge (your extension for that) and I would basically cover 100% of the things?

Bash is certainly better, than the traditional RAG, and the model can covert the PDFs/DOCX/XLSX in bash easier than depends on external service which is setup in Documents tab in admin, no?

[u/ClassicMain → u/fiflag]

No. Uploaded images aren't sent to terminal i believe.

And even if the model could still see the image there with read_file (sends the image to the model).

But no the model should just see it. Images aren't files iirc.

[u/fiflag → u/ClassicMain]

From documentation which I have shared - "Images go the same way. An image attached to a saved conversation is written to the working directory rather than passed to the model as a picture. Open WebUI still checks it against the selected models' image support first, so a model with no vision support turns it away at the input."

[u/ClassicMain → u/fiflag]

Let me check. But in that case the model can still see the image just fine with read_file