In their everyday work people are confronted with ever growing amounts of information and thus often feel overloaded with data. Trails, built from information about the users’ browsing paths and activities, are an established approach to assist users in navigating vast information spaces and finding appropriate information. While existing systems focus on web browsers only, we argue that trails can be generated by any application. We describe TrailTRECer, a framework which supports trail-based information access, and which is open to any application. The usability of the framework and the concept of user trails were tested by building a trail-enabled browser client and a print manager client. Initial user evaluations indicate the usefulness of this approach.