Leveraging free tools

08th March 2017
Leveraging free tools
Jayashree (left) and Deepa.... lveraging Zoho Creator

International Women's Day special: Women and Technology- 3
 Chennai-based Zoho, markets a suite of office productivity solutions world-wide.  The free versions of the same tools have helped women  work-from-home on commercial assignments
By Narmadhaa.S

Chennai, March 8 2017: Creating an app is not easy: You may have the  right idea -- but the nitty gritty of pgrogramming is a challenge to all except trained software engineers.  But  Zoho Creator, changed all that. It's  a platform from Zoho that helps build customized apps within minutes, on the cloud without formal coding. And what’s  more,  you can build mobile apps as well, which are all the rage.
Home makers in India have been quick to seize the free version of Creator to  craft apps of their own -- which  fueled their own   first steps as a  'homepreneur'.
Jayasree, and  Deepa are two such women, who use Creator to  build  customized business apps. They select their clients, sidestep agents, and work when they want to. They make a 'business' of it, re-crafting the thirst for crafts, to craft apps instead.
Jayashree Sukavanam,  is an  IT specialist.  After maintaining finance and IT applications in multiple companies, Jayasree took a step back  to the home -- for herself. She was called in  as a consultant by Saahas Zero Waste to see how a lot of its processes could be automated in order to focus on what the organization truly believe in – making the world a cleaner place to live in. Jayashree  used Creator to helped Saahas  launch  an application for seamless functioning of the business. She now receives lot of enquiries to build apps.
One afternoon, 10 years ago, Deepa Govind  realized she was bored at home. The kids were at school and the husband at work. Driven by curiosity, Deepa started a blog, writing about her Zoology education at first, then peppering it with stories of life as home maker. She was looking for a way to add a contact form on her website, when she stumbled on Zoho Creator. What began there, transcended into a document management app for her freelance projects. Motivated, Deepa started experimenting with Deluge, the inbuilt scripting language, and soon became a Zoho Creator certified developer. She now freelances as an app developer for businesses across the globe.
For these women, creativity was a chance app-ening  that they  transformed into a fulfilling business.