I don't know how people generally flag "application temporarily unavailable", perhaps there is some built in support in seam somewhere? You could always have an application scoped bean with an "unavailable"-flag and then have navigation rules to a friendly information page. This flag would be updated on init exception (or manually through an admin interface) perhaps. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4123337#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...