Yeah, you got a problem because the Quartz threadpool is probably not really "kosher" in the container environment (it should really be using JCA to take advantage of a container threadpool). So I'm not sure if you will even be able to look up UserTransaction from that thread. I can see a couple of approaches: (1) like Norman says, try managing transactions using the TransactionManager (ugly!) (2) try using a non-JTA EntityManager, and a resource-local transaction on the EM JPA doesn't let you flush outside of a transaction. Note that this is not a Seam question, and the guys in the EJB3 forum might have better answers for this one that we do here. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3993988#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...