Start the WebCenter Suite domain

Each domain has an adminServer which need to be started before we can start the managed servers.

This can be done by executing the startWebLogic.cmd command in following directory:
<middleware home>\user_projects\domains\webcenter_domain\bin

The admin server will now start. Be patient, this can take a few minutes depending on your system.

The server has been started when you see following line:
<WebLogicServer> <BEA-000360> <Server started in RUNNING mode>

You can open the console:
http://localhost:7001/console

When you have been logged in to the console you can take a look at your environment by opening the servers page from the environment section:

There you can see the managed server that you need to start:

• WC_Collaboration: contains the WebCenter services
• WC_Portlet: used for deploying portlets
• WC_Spaces: this is the WebCenter Spaces server
• WC_Utilities: Analytics and activity graph is installed on this one.

The beauty of this is that you only need to start the servers you want. For example, if you don't want to use the analytics or discussions, you just can start the spaces server. This is what we will do now.

You can't start the servers from the console unless you have installed the node manager but we haven't done so.

The basic command for starting a managed server is the following:
startManagedWebLogic.cmd <managedServer> <WebLogic HTTP address>

For example in order to start the spaces server we need to execute following command:
startManagedWebLogic.cmd WC_Spaces http://localhost:7001

When you execute this command, some initializations will take place and after that you will need to provide the username and password of the admin user you defined during install.

When you start the server you might see an error that looks like this:

Although the server will be started, the WebCenter application will not work.

In order to solve this, you only need to recompile the packages from the DEV_MDS schema. If you don't know how to do this, this can be done in JDeveloper. First create a connection to the DEV_MDS schema.
Make sure you also compile the package body and not only the specifications!

Shutdown the managed server first and rerun the command to start the managed server.
Now you should see the server in running mode without seeing any error message.

Test the spaces application by going to http://localhost:8888/webcenter

When you see the default welcome page, your server works!

Happy developing!

You now can start playing with WebCenter Spaces and the services. There is however something missing if you want to make use of all the features. For the document servers, you will need UCM. I did not include the steps to install UCM because it is a seperate product.
I will write a similar post on how to install and configure UCM so you can use it in your Spaces Environment.

If there is something missing in the description or you have doubts, please leave a comment so i can update the howto.