SQL Server Reporting Services is great in the fact that it comes with a handful of different rendering (export) formats out of the box. If a particular report is intended to be paginated and printed, then from my web applications, I will often link to the report with a parameter instructing the render format to be PDF - this way, the user is never taken to the report viewer (they just get an Open/Save As dialog for the PDF itself).
The URL for such a link may resemble the following:
http://server/ReportServer?/path/reportname&rs:Command=Render&rc:LinkTarget=_blank&rs:Format=PDF&SomeParameterValue=1
There are other interesting things that you can do with the rs:Format parameter. For instance, say that you create a tiny report that only contains a chart. Why not have this report rendered as an image, and then you can show this chart on your website (i.e., no extra charting component would be necessary on your web server). Simply specify the URL to your report in an IMG tag's SRC property, and include the following parameters in that URL:
rs:Format=IMAGE&rc:OutputFormat=PNG (or GIF, or JPG, etc)
One problem with not going through the default web-based report viewer, though: the report server likes to cache the output for your browser session. Therefore, if the underlying data changes, re-running these reports will not show the updated information unless you close your browser and hit the page again.
After a bit of headscratching and searching on the Internet, I found an easy solution that can be used to always force the reports to query the database. Simply include the following parameter in your report's URL:
rs:ClearSession=true
Of course, you will take more of a hit on your database (because the report will always requery its datasets). But, perhaps in your solution, you can selectively use this parameter if the user wants to force a refresh of a report that is automatically rendered to PDF or an image - that's a design decision that you'll have to make.
I'm just happy that a mechanism exists to get around the default behavior!