Aside from the news that a 10-year-old boy playing with matches started one of them, the California wildfires have mostly fallen off the front pages of most of the nation’s newspapers.

But businesses will be feeling the effects of these fires for quite awhile. Especially at risk are the small and medium-sized businesses whose physical offices were either partially or completely destroyed.

As we reported, even those businesses whose property was spared by the fire had trouble getting their employees to the office. Many had to work remotely because they had been evacuated from their homes or simply had no way to reach the office (or no clothes to wear to the office).

That’s where free online collaboration tools can become a must. Online services like Zoho and Google Apps might prove useful to employees who have no access to their office computers.

One vendor, HyperOffice, announced this week that it will offer its online business collaboration and business continuity technology free to qualified California companies for 90 days. The Rockville, Md.-based vendor offered the same free services to companies affected by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

HyperOffice offers email, document management, contact management, security, backup, time and expense tracking, portal management, and a variety of other on-demand technologies.

Plenty of SMBs might take the company up on the offer. And who knows, when that 90-day offer expires, maybe some of them will like the company’s services so much they’ll be willing to pay the $7 per-use per-month charge that HyperOffice usually charges its customers.