The Tracfone system sells phone cards that need to be activated.
When you buy the phone, they want a land-line number.  You are to use that
for activation of the phone.
They probably use caller-id to check if this is OK.
From then on you need the phone id (or EID electronic id).
To activate the phone, you need the land-line, the EID, a personal pin that will
be used to code the information and the phone.
The information is keyed into the web page (www.tracfone.com) and it returns
code numbers to enter into the phone.  You then have the phone call based
on these code numbers.
This activates the phone and gives you a phone number that the phone uses.
The phone card has a viable number is scanned at the cash register.
You then remove a sticker off of the internal number. 
This number, referred to a PIN.
You get the web page, enter the EID and PIN.
You get a code number to enter into the phone, and the phone is used to
call in.
This updates the central data base and the phone.

<P>
The Group Decision Center http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/gdc/
<P>
WebCal
<P>
some common industry tools are Outlook and Lotus notes.
May be able to get MS and IBM to provide academic access to some of these
tools.
<P>
<A HREF=http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/vanderaalst98application.html>
The Application of Petri Nets to Workflow Management (1998) </A>
W.M.P. van der Aalst
<P>
also by Aalst
<BR>
Wil van der Aalst and Kees van Hee,
Workflow Management, MIT pres, 2002.
<P>
<A HREF=http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/ellis96workflow.html>
Ellis and Nutt
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/ellis96workflow.html
<P>
<A HREF=http://www.usabilityfirst.com/groupware/cscw.txl>
Usablitity First (CSGW)
</A>
http://www.usabilityfirst.com/groupware/cscw.txl
<P>
How XML (and web based services) fits.
<BR>
Burner, Mike,
The Deliberate Revolution,
ACM Queue: tomorrow's computing today,
March 2003, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp28-37.