NEWS & EVENTS

Langevin to talk jobs on Tuesday night at town hall event in Providence

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — U.S. Rep. Jim Langevin (LAN'-jih-vin) is touring Providence to discuss job creation. Langevin is scheduled to meet with community organizations on Tuesday afternoon about their work with the unemployed. He is also hosting a town hall meeting at 6 p.m. at the Silver Lake Community Center. Langevin will make his first stop at 1:15 p.m. at Providence Community Action, where he will check in on efforts to help low-to-moderate-income individuals and families. At 2:15 p.m., he is scheduled to visit Employment 2000 Inc., where he is expected to discuss the organization's efforts to get jobless residents back to work. City Councilman John Igliozzi, state Sen. Frank Ciccone and state Rep. John Carnevale will join Langevin on his afternoon stops.

Zoho Creator Simplifies Data Management for Providence Community Action - A Case Study

Providence Community Action is a private, non profit organization, dedicated to improving the quality of life for low income Providence residents. Their services include heating and weatherization assistance, consumer credit and debt counseling, clinical services (counseling), case management, an affordable housing program, Interim Middle School for youth excluded from regular public school and much more.

We spoke to Damian Costantino, the organization's IT director who's responsible for networking communications, system administration and database creation. Damian had implemented an application using Zoho Creator, and they had about five users using it extensively. These five users in turn would deal with 100's of clients. Damian, being the database administrator, was very well-versed in programming languages like Python and SQL, and had previously experimented with Google Forms, Filemaker, Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Access.

Complexity was not a concern, but the cost certainly was. They wanted something affordable, yet robust, especially because they were operating from four different locations, but not on the same VPN. No client should be serviced at more than one location, and details of the services provided had to be reported to their funders and agencies which refer clients.

"What I like most about Zoho Creator is that you can make it as complicated as you want or drill down as you want. The limit is what you put on it." - Damian Constantino, IT Director

The integration between Zoho Creator and Zoho Reports is what they use extensively, second to sharing forms. Damian has made union queries a big part of the reports they generate, so that the graphical representation of data is self-explanatory; people don't have to filter data. He says this application has improved their data collection and reporting efficiency 100%. They also appreciated not having to configure a connection to a back-end database and constantly ensure the connection is sound.

Eliminating usage complexities for those who collect and report on data is an advantage with Zoho Creator, he said. Zoho Creator turned out to be all that they were looking for in a database application, efficiently refining the way they collected and reported on data. We're also proud of the fact that Damian, a system administrator and a network engineer who holds data security as a primary responsibility trusts Zoho Creator with their organization's sensitive data. Watch out for some more myth-busting stories about Zoho Creator. Coming soon.