Maven2: Missing artifact but jars are in place

I received this same issue on SpringSource Tools ver 2.8.0.RELEASE. I had to do Maven -> Update Maven Dependencies and check the option for "Force Update of Snapshot/Releases".

There are a few other options apart from Project->Clean, some of which are more along the lines of turning it off and on again.

• Try right-clicking on the project and selecting Maven->Update Project Configuration.
• Disable then re-enable dependency management (right-click Maven->Disable Dependency Management then Maven->Enable Dependency Management
• Close the project and reopen it.
• Check that your Maven settings are configured correctly. If you are behind a proxy you'll need to configure the proxy settings in the global or user settings.
• Check you're using the Maven installation you expect. By default m2eclipse uses the embedder, if you have a separate installation you may want to configure m2eclipse to use the external installation so that CLI and Eclipse builds are consistent. This also ensures you're configured to connect through any proxy as above.