This patch does a bunch of improvements on the pom.xml files, including some best practices.
I 've maven2ized several projects, including spring-rich-c.sf.net and networktools.sf.net.

• Clean up order of elements
• Lock down plugin versions (so the build is repreducable and behaves the same between all team members): probably the most important issue
• jira location
• use of dependencyManagement to declare the versions of dependencies and inherit that to all modules, which declare which dependencies they need
• organization is now JBoss Inc.
• lock down compiler source/target to 1.4 (you wouldn't want to publish a class version 49 (=1.5) jar to the central maven repo if you're using JDK 1.5 locally)
• schema definitions for code-completion in the IDE while editing the pom.xml
• servletapi:servletapi:2.3 dependency changed to javax.servlet:servlet-api:2.3
• and more

It was just to much to try to make separate patches/jira's of it. Feel free to adjust it as you see fit.
I had to test this patch with -Dmaven.test.skip=true because there was a failing testcase on the trunk:
Running org.drools.base.ShadowProxyFactoryTest
Tests run: 5, Failures: 1, Errors: 0, Skipped: 0, Time elapsed: 0.125 sec <<< FAILURE!

Note: drools (and it's submodules core, compiler, jsr94, decisiontables), drools-server, drools-repository and drools-jbrms build succesfully like this:
mvn -Dmaven.test.skip=true clean install
cd drools-server
mvn -Dmaven.test.skip=true clean install
cd ../drools-repository
mvn -Dmaven.test.skip=true clean install
cd ../drools-jbrms
mvn -Dmaven.test.skip=true clean install
So you should be able to just uncomment them in <modules> in the root pom.xml