GAP

Overview

Working with GAP since 2014, the latest project started as the creation of an Employee Portal for employes to find information and resources within their organization as part of the Old Navy spin off. When the spinoff was canceled, we shifted to a larger initiative to modernize GAP’s digital workplace by leveraging cutting-edge technologies such as Adobe Experience project focused on delivering an enterprise search experience for GAP’s internal employee portal, rather than a consumer-facing retail search. The primary objective was to improve how employees and partners could discover internal content across GAP’s digital workplace, particularly within an Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) ecosystem.

The Challenge

GAP needed an AI Search solution that could operate effectively within an AEM-based employee portal, integrating with enterprise content sources while meeting internal security and relevance expectations. The challenge was not just indexing content, but connecting disparate internal systems into a unified search experience that employees could trust for daily work.

Solution

I served as Search Architect, we evaluated multiple vendors including Lucidworks and Attivio, but decided on Coveo  as the solution. Coveo provided a robust search experience that could be easily integrated into GAP’s AEM environment, howerver GAPs custom AEM environment required a custom connector which I developed with Coveo’s team to handle instant document updates and per user security. This was actually initially open sourced github .

The work included:

• Designing the overall search architecture for the employee portal
• Building and integrating custom AEM data source connectors which handled instant document updates and per user security
• Ensuring the search experience aligned with enterprise security and access controls
• Supporting internal portal use cases rather than public eCommerce search
• Assisted with Infosecal compliance and data protection measures to migrate to a cloud provider

Your role emphasized architecture, integration strategy, and relevance design, rather than simple out-of-the-box deployment.

Technologies Used

• Coveo
• TypeScript
• Java
• Adobe Experience Manager

Results

The project was launched on time and continues to serve GAPs employee portal and vendor extranet.