An Open Way to Organize Your Travel Plans Using Zimbra Email and Calendar with TripIt

At Zimbra we’re always trying to provide our community with the most efficient tools for organizing email, address books, calendars and web documents, so it’s only natural that we look to work with other with companies who are as enthusiastic about streamlined processes as we are, and share the same commitment to open standards.

One of the latest things you can now do with Zimbra is integrate with TripIt – an innovative service that organizes and shares your travel itinerary. With TripIt, users simply email their booked travel plans to TripIt, and the service will create a master travel itinerary plan. Users may then access or share this itinerary online, via their mobile device, or from their personal calendar.

This is where we step in. Because Zimbra is an open platform, users of TripIt can instantly access flight times, hotel arrivals, and much more from the convenience of their own Zimbra calendar automatically.  The integration is especially useful in business settings, as Zimbra’s shareable schedule options and synched group calendars allow employees to view their own work-related travel itinerary alongside their co-workers’ in a shared Zimbra calendar. This way, all are kept in the loop regarding everyone’s travel whereabouts at work.

This integration also takes advantage of a number of open standards that are supported by Zimbra and TripIt including email and iCal.  Here’s how you can get TripIt integration within your Zimbra account:

1.   Go to TripIt.com and create an account
2.   When you receive an email from your travel company, forward it to plans@tripit.com
3.   Go to TripIt and find the iCal feed URL and find the URL to subscribe to your calendar
4.   Go back to Zimbra and create a new calendar called “My Trips” or whatever you prefer to call it
5.   Paste in the iCal URL after you select sync with external cal
6.   Right click refresh and your trip calendar should appear!