Hibernate Version: 3.x

Problem statement:

I have 2 projects that were developed separately and that used Hibernate as the persistence mechanism. They used the same class name e.g., Task, but were of course in different packages.
Later on it was decided to integrate these 2 projects. But Hibernate complained that there was more than 1 hibernate class with the same name, i.e., it was not looking at the fully qualified package name.
I tried the auto-import="false" option and then it complained about not finding the Task class, when it was referenced.

Question
Is there a "best-practice" on how to integrate 2 existing hibernate projects with just 1 hibernate configuration file, without changing the existing class names?