Dependency convergence error

I know I'm late to the party, but after scratching my head for 8-10 hours, I came around this solution which fixes the problem when you don't have control over different poms where the different versions of dependencies are used at different places. So, I thought it's worth sharing.

@Gerold's answer is an ideal one (source: Maven wiki). But, it works for the case when you are the owner of all the dependencies and have the time, luxury and write permission to fix the issue at the root. In my case, I was using a company-wide global parent pom which had different versions set in different places, so I was facing this issue. I wanted to find some way to fix this on my end without changing the global parent pom.

To fix this, in your project's parent pom, you can specify the exact version which matches with rest of the places and override the versions specified by the global parent poms at different places. You can add this block in your project's parent pom

<!-- ============================= -->
<!-- DEPENDENCY MANAGEMENT -->
<!-- ============================= -->
<dependencyManagement>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>commons-collections</groupId>
            <artifactId>commons-collections</artifactId>
            <!-- This version should be consistent 
                 with versions at other places -->
            <version>3.2.2</version>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
</dependencyManagement>

HTH

See POM Reference, Exclusions:

Exclusions explicitly tell Maven that you don't want to include the specified project that is a dependency of this dependency (in other words, its transitive dependency).

See also Apache Maven Enforcer Rules, Dependency Convergence:

If a project has two dependencies, A and B, both depending on the same artifact, C, this rule will fail the build if A depends on a different version of C then the version of C depended on by B.

[...]

And this will succeed.

   <dependency>
      <groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
      <artifactId>slf4j-jdk14</artifactId>
      <version>1.6.1</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
      <artifactId>slf4j-nop</artifactId>
      <version>1.6.0</version>
      <exclusions>
        <exclusion>
          <groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
          <artifactId>slf4j-api</artifactId>
        </exclusion>
      </exclusions>
    </dependency>