Multiple Sitecore EXM Root Managers and missing templates

One of the flexibility points of Sitecore EXM is its manager root. You can create as many of these as you want and each one controls the settings for how emails from that manager root will be treated. These are pretty easy to create and Sitecore Hacker has a nice run down on his Email Manager in Details post. There is something left out here though and left out in the Sitecore documentation as well. In theory you can create your root managers where every you want in the content tree. At least there is nothing that will stop you. However, if you don't create them in the right place you will see some odd behavior.

If you try and create a template for a given manager root in EXM and see no templates this is the odd behavior I speak of. The image to the left shows this.

This issue is caused by one area of the EXM root manager configuration requiring that it has one and only one location to look for email managers. So even though you can create lots of these, they all ave to be managed under one node in the content tree.

In the content tree under sitecore/system/settings/email there is a value that must be set here that identifies the "Root Parent Item" for "E-mail Campaign Manager root".

If you create root managers outside of this parent node you will see odd behavior like noted above. It seems you can create a root manager here and then move it the templates will keep working for you. However, given there are probably other unknown side effects I recommend keeping all your root managers under this parent node.

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