Leveraging free tools: Tools that help women work-from-home

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

Creating an app is not easy: You may have the right idea -- but the nitty gritty of programming 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 fuelled 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.

—Narmadhaa.S, IndiaTechOnline