Using Maven in Netbeans

After upgrading from Netbeans 6.5 to Netbeans 6.7.1 I realized that the Maven options window changed a bit. At first it caused some confusion for us but with some digging we got to understand how it works.

For some reason the option "Work Offline" was removed from the interface. It took some fursther digging to realize that there is a settings.xml file in %user_home%/.m2 that you can use to specify settings for the Maven built in to Netbeans. With that we were able to change the local repository and set whether Maven will work on or offline.